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.)

Question

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.)

Accepted Answer

Hello everyone. And in today's video we have a problem that may seem much more difficult than it actually is. So we have a fill a genetic tree. We're told that based on the above fill a genetic tree, where is the true order of difficulty to develop drugs that combat human pathogens are precarious protests, animals or fungi. So let me quickly remind you of an aspect of drug creation that is going to help us solve this problem. We have the developing drugs becomes more difficult when the pathogen is closely related to humans. And the reason for this is that these drugs target the structure and the metabolism of the pathogen. The pathogen is very similar to a human cell. Then it's going to become difficult to target a pathogen without also targeting the human cell. So is what difficulty increases as the pathogen becomes more and more closely related to humans. So let's identify humans in the file a genie as pathogens belonging to the same group as humans are going to be the ones that are most closely related to humans and the ones that is most difficult to develop drugs against and humans belong to the animal group in the collagen. So we have identified that animals are the ones that is the most difficult to develop drugs against the animal pathogens. Answer choice is the only answer choice where animal pathogens is the most difficult group to develop drugs against is answer choice a where we say that animal pathogens followed by corona flagellating pathogens followed by fungal and nuclear rate pathogens is the order of difficulty to develop drugs to combat human pathogens. And so that is the answer to our question. I really hope this video helped you, and I hope to see you on the next one.

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Key Concepts

Phylogenetic Tree

Metabolism Disruption

Structural Features of Pathogens