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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
