{"id":110850,"date":"2017-11-02T09:55:48","date_gmt":"2017-11-02T13:55:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/?p=110850"},"modified":"2018-07-27T15:00:18","modified_gmt":"2018-07-27T19:00:18","slug":"what-i-mean-when-i-say-lee-abrahamsen-and-host","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/2017\/11\/02\/what-i-mean-when-i-say-lee-abrahamsen-and-host\/","title":{"rendered":"What I Mean When I Say: \u2018Host,\u2019 with Lee Abrahamsen"},"content":{"rendered":"

You can host a party. You can host a TV show. <\/span><\/p>\n

But in Associate Professor of Biology Lee Abrahamsen\u2019s profession, a “host” is more likely to harbor a parasite.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Rachel Blaustein ’18 of Needham, Mass., stands with Associate Professor of Biology Lee Abrahamsen during a biology lab in 2016.<\/p><\/div>\n

Many people think of a biological host in terms of disease \u2014 a person plays host to the flu virus. But a bacterium can host a piece of \u201cdonor\u201d DNA.<\/p>\n

A host, Abrahamsen says, \u201cis really anything that harbors something else in a way that allows the \u2018something else\u2019 to survive.”<\/p>\n

Abrahamsen’s priority used to be virology; she used embryonic lung cells as hosts to grow the human herpes virus. About a decade ago, in order to bring more senior thesis students into her work, she shifted to bacteriology, studying antibiotic-resistant bacteria.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe host becomes the thing that\u2019s infected,\u201d she said. \u201cSo the host can be a single cell, or it can be a whole organism. We\u2019ve looked at different strains of antibiotic-resistant staph in people, in students, in dogs, and in horses. All of those are hosts.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt’s not so much about the specific species involved, but more about the relationship between one organism and another. It really does swap meaning depending on what you\u2019re talking about.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

You can host a party. You can host a TV show. But in Bates biologist Lee Abrahamsen\u2019s profession, you\u2019re more likely to host a parasite.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1005,"featured_media":110853,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_hide_ai_chatbot":false,"_ai_chatbot_style":"","associated_faculty":[],"_Page_Specific_Css":"","_bates_restrict_mod":false,"_table_of_contents_display":false,"_table_of_contents_location":"","_table_of_contents_disableSticky":false,"_is_featured":false,"footnotes":"","_bates_seo_meta_description":"","_bates_seo_block_robots":false,"_bates_seo_sharing_image_id":0,"_bates_seo_sharing_image_twitter_id":0,"_bates_seo_share_title":"","_bates_seo_canonical_overwrite":"","_bates_seo_twitter_template":""},"categories":[4,14,217],"tags":[1690,5213,10116],"class_list":["post-110850","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-academic-life","category-faculty-staff","category-science-technology","tag-biology","tag-lee-abrahamsen","tag-what-i-mean-when-i-say"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110850","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1005"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=110850"}],"version-history":[{"count":16,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110850\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":117375,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110850\/revisions\/117375"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/110853"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=110850"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=110850"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=110850"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}