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Magazine Chapter 28: Q28-7TYU (page 615)
DRAW IT Medical researchers seek to develop drugs that can kill or restrict the growth of human pathogens yet have few harmful effects on patients. These drugs often work by disrupting the metabolism of the pathogen or by targeting its structural features. Draw and label a phylogenetic tree that includes an ancestral prokaryote and the following groups of organisms: Excavata, SAR, Archaeplastida, Unikonta, and, within Unikonta, amoebozoans, animals, choanoflagellates, fungi, and nucleariids. Based on this tree, hypothesize whether it would be most difficult to develop drugs to combat human pathogens that are prokaryotes, protists, animals, or fungi. (You do not need to consider the evolution of drug resistance by the pathogen.)
Short Answer
Creating drugs that can combat pathogens that share similar traits with humans is difficult. The drugs fail to target the pathogens and start targeting the human body due to similarities in structural and metabolic components.
The solution is creating a phylogenetic tree to trace back in time and determine the evolutionary process.
Step by step solution
Drugs
Drugs are chemicals that are synthesized to treat specific diseases within the human body. The drugs are prepared after studying the pattern of the disease. The drugs are then designed in a way so as to target specific metabolic components or structures of the disease-causing agents.
Difficulty in eliminating pathogens that share traits with humans
Several pathogens present within the human body are difficult to treat through target drugs because these pathogens possess similar traits and metabolic characteristics as humans.
When these traits are targeted, they can target both the pathogen and humans. It can therefore pose serious threats to the body.
Role of the phylogenetic tree in drug treatment
For treating pathogenic diseases, drugs have to be prepared after constructing the phylogenetic tree. This prevents the creation of drugs that do not target the same characteristics between the pathogen and humans.
The phylogenetic tree provides information about the order across which humans shared traits and which organism was their ancestor during the past.
This information enables the creation of drugs that do not cause harm to the human body and kill the pathogen only.
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