phylogenetic trees

What tells us that this new form of H1N1 is swine flu and not regular old human flu or avian flu? If we had a lab, we might use antibodies, but when you're a digital biologist, you use a computer. Activity 4. Picking influenza sequences and comparing them with phylogenetic trees We can get the genome sequences, piece by piece, as I described in earlier, but the NCBI has other tools that are useful, too. The Influenza Virus Resource will let us pick sequences, align them, and make trees so we can quickly compare the sequences to each other. This is how I got the sequences that I wrote about…

This afternoon, I was working on educational activities and suddenly realized that the H1N1 strain that caused the California outbreak might be the same strain that caused an outbreak in 2007 at an Ohio country fair. UPDATE: I'm not so certain anymore that the strains are the same. I'm doing some work with nucleic acid sequences to look further at similarity. Here's the data. Once I realized that the genome sequences from the H1N1 swine flu were in the NCBI's virus genome resources database, I had to take a look. And, like eating potato chips, making phylogenetic trees is a little bit…

I was pretty impressed to find the swine flu genome sequences, from the cases in California and Texas, already for viewing at the NCBI. You can get them and work them, too. It's pretty easy. Tomorrow, we'll align sequences and make trees. Activity 3: Getting the swine flu sequence data 1. Go to the NCBI, find the Influenza Virus Resource page and follow the link to: 04/27/2009: Newest swine influenza A (H1N1) sequences. 2. You'll see a page that looks like this: Each column heading is a name of a segment of the influenza genome. You can see there are eight of these. Each segment…

Ebola virus has impressed me as creepy ever since I read "The Hot Zone: A Terrifying True Story some years back by Richard Preston. (I guess he has a new book, too, Panic in Level 4: Cannibals, Killer Viruses, and Other Journeys to the Edge of Science but I haven't been in airport for the past couple of weeks, so I haven't read it yet.) Technorati Tags: blast, phylogenetic trees, Ebola, viruses Infectious agents that cause diseases with gruesome symptoms really excite those of us with an interest in microbiology. Tara has written about this paper, too, and summarized the details. I…