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 ...
Last night, the phone rang at 9:22 pm. I quickly glanced at the caller ID. Hmmm. Why is the Seattle School district calling us at this time of night? Apparently the swine flu has come to Seattle and the school district thought we should know. Those messages are helpful if ...
Genome sequences from California and Texas isolates of the H1N1 swine flu are already available for exploration at the NCBI. Let's do a bit of digital biology and see what we can learn. Activity 1. What kinds of animals get the flu? For the past few years we've been worrying ...
I'm teaching an on-line bioinformatics course this semester for Austin Community College. They are in Texas of course, but I am in Seattle. This presents a few interesting challenges and some minor moments of amusement. Today, the school sent all the faculty emails telling us to stay home if we're ...
Nick's post on Amantadine resistance in swine flu was so interesting, I had to look at the protein structures myself. I couldn't find any structures with the S31N mutation that Nick discussed, but I did find some structures with the M2 protein and Amantadine. Not only are these structures beautiful ...
