During a discussion about blogging on the Coast to Coast Bio Podcast, it was suggested that science professors should spend more time writing about their research - by explaining what problems they are trying to solve, how they approach them, and why they are interesting. My goal here at virology ...

Would influenza virus be the same pathogen if it could not undergo reassortment of its segmented RNA genome? This is the question being asked in the wake of the development of a method to prevent the free assortment of influenza viral RNAs. The process of influenza virus replication includes the ...

Hosts: Vincent Racaniello and Dick Despommier On episode 49 of the podcast 'This Week in Virology", Vincent and Dick continue Virology 101 with a discussion of the seven different types of viral genomes, and how to use the pathway to mRNA to understand viral replication. [powerpress url="http://traffic.libsyn.com/twiv/TWiV049.mp3"] Click the arrow ...

In a recent study of influenza virus reassortment in ferrets, the authors used polymerase chain reaction (PCR) to search for viruses with RNA segments from the 2009 pandemic H1N1 strain and seasonal H1N1 and H3N2 strains. I thought you might like to see how I did a similar experiment in ...

An Australian group has reported results of a clinical trial to determine the safety and immunogenicity of a 2009 pandemic H1N1 influenza virus vaccine. Twenty-one days after the first of two scheduled doses, the vaccine proved to be immunogenic in adults. This is good news, as many had believed that ...