Animal Defenses against Infectious Agents Is Damage Control More Important Than Pathogen Control.docVIP

Primer Animal Defenses against Infectious Agents: Is Damage Control More Important Than Pathogen Control? Andrew F. Read*, Andrea L. Graham, Lars R?berg O nce an infectious agent is established, hosts can do two things to minimize the agent’s impact on their health. Most obviously, they can directly attack the tolerance mechanisms. For one thing, natural selection is more likely to drive alleles conferring tolerance to fixation (reaching 100% frequency in a population) [6]. In contrast, resistance mechanisms work by eliminating parasites, and thus undermine the very selection pressures that favoured them in the first place. As a particular resistance mechanism nears fixation in a host population, parasites must change or die out, rendering the resistance mechanism unnecessary or useless. Tolerance will not prompt antagonistic counter- adaptation by pathogens, since it does not harm pathogen fitness [2]. Moreover, tolerance should have a neutral or even positive effect on pathogen prevalence. Hence, there will be continual selection in favour of a tolerance trait, even as it becomes common in the host population. Perhaps a very important evolutionary reason why pathogens do not make hosts even sicker is because an endless succession of tolerance mechanisms have gone to fixation through evolutionary time. The scientific focus on resistance may be because parasite killing mechanisms are both more easily observed and more likely to be genetically variable because of host–parasite coevolution. Now, however, experimentalists are beginning to turn their attention to damage control as well as pathogen control by animals. growing pathogen population to contain or eliminate it. But hosts can also attempt to minimize the harm caused by a given number of pathogens, for instance by ramping up tissue repair and detoxifying pathogen by-products. “Resistance” and “tolerance,” as these two types of defense are known in the plant literature, were first distinguished by botanists in