After my lecture on influenza pathogenesis and evolution at the Northeast Laboratory Conference 2010 in Portland, Maine, I was asked if it is necessary to receive the influenza vaccine every year. This question was precipitated by my statement that the 2010-11 trivalent influenza vaccine contains the same swine-origin H1N1 strain ...

This week€™s addition to the virology toolbox was written by Chris Upton The Jalview package: a multiple alignment editor. This software is primarily aimed at the alignment of protein sequences. Some of the key features are: It allows you to edit the alignment It has functions to display associated protein ...

Hosts: Vincent Racaniello, Alan Dove, and LJ Tan On Episode 103 of the podcast This Week in Virology, Vincent and Alan discuss influenza vaccines with LJ Tan of the American Medical Association. [powerpress url="http://traffic.libsyn.com/twiv/TWiV103.mp3"] Click the arrow above to play, or right-click to download TWiV #103 (56 MB .mp3, 77 minutes) ...

This week€™s addition to the virology toolbox was written by Chris Upton Generating multiple sequence alignments (MSA) is one of the most commonly used bioinformatics techniques. The sequences to be compared can be DNA (promoters, genes, genomes) or proteins. Note that the length and number of sequences to be aligned ...

The need to re-formulate the influenza virus vaccine in response to viral antigenic drift and shift makes for complex logistics of vaccine production and administration. Surveillance programs must be conducted each year to identify strains that are likely to predominate and cause disease. Wouldn€™t it be simpler if a single ...