Thursday, June 29, 2006

Influenza articles, and sharing flu data

Some recent articles:

Influenza and the challenge for immunology, by Peter Doherty and others, summarising what is known about the interaction between the H5N1 virus and the mammalian host response, published in Nature Immunology.

What came before 1918? - a news item in Science on work by Jeffery Taubenberger on what viruses caused the flu epidemics before the 1918 one. Taubenberger was a member of the team that worked out the genome of the 1918 virus. This work may help discover the origins of that 1918 virus.

A letter in Science on the FLU-ID project, which will share information from veterinary virologists about the virus. This will be done in association with the NIH Influenza Genome Project and GenBank. The NIH Project I am guessing is the one at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/genomes/FLU/FLU.html. Genbank is at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Genbank/index.html. The same letter comes up in various places in a Google search - search for flu id, rather than flu-id (or it asks if you meant "fluid").

Later note: Nature of 29th June carries an editorial advocating sharing of flu data. It refers to the letter in Science (I think) but also reports moves in the US House of Representatives calling on the US Health Secretary to require sequence data to be deposited in GenBank.

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