St. Jude Researchers Identify Bird-Flu Gene
Additionally, a protein – NS, for non-structural protein – may be the key to why the bird influenza is so destructive to the cells it infects, a potential virulence determinant, according to Science.
"We were surprised to see a lot of variation in this NS protein. That was the clue. We felt it must be playing an important biological role," Clayton Naeve, senior author of the Science paper and chief of molecular biology at St. Jude, told Reuters.
According to an article distributed by the Canadian Press news agency:
An initial analysis of the viral sequencing performed by Naeve and his co-authors from St. Jude Children's Hospital in Memphis, Tenn., identified a sort of tag on the end of the non-structural, or NS1, protein inside avian viruses that may help explain the high death toll in people who become infected with the H5N1 virus.
The NS1 protein is known to block the production of interferon, a protein the immune system generates to help it fight viral infections.
The NS1 proteins from avian viruses differed from those of human viruses, containing this special motif or tag that allows the avian NS1 protein to latch on to proteins in human cells.
The H5N1 virus and the H1N1 virus, which caused the 1918 pandemic, have the bird motif. The viruses that caused the milder pandemics of 1957 and 1968 had a human motif on their NS1 proteins.
This is an important molecular insight, but does not unravel the riddle public health authorities face in dealing with a threat of a flu pandemic should the H5N1 bird flu virus mutate into a form that easily passes from person to person.
“You need much more work to demonstrate this actually contributes to virulence in nature," Naeve said.
Naeve and his St. Jude colleagues are conducting a project to sequence all of the genomes of known influenza viruses.
The work that yielded this particular insight was a large-scale sequencing of some 300 avian influenza viruses from a set of 11,000 flu viruses collected by Robert Webster of St. Jude's Infectious Diseases department.
The researchers produced 70 million bases of sequence information leading to DNA sequences for 2,196 genes and 169 complete bird-flu genomes. The new data has been combined with public data and will be available to researchers in a public genetic database.
The research was conducted in St. Jude's molecular biology lab and on its powerful computational system.
The institution's Hartwell Center for Bioinformatics and Biotechnology houses the big three tools – high-throughput DNA sequence analysis, gene-expression analysis, and proteomics/mass spectrometry. The torrent of data produced by all this sophisticated hardware – some 70 million bases of sequence information just for the 2,196 gens and 169 viruses in the study – was then analyzed, according to St. Jude information, on an IBM eServer BladeCenter Linux cluster system that includes 280 servers benchmarked at 600 billion floating-point operations per second, ranking it 251 among the world's top 500 supercomputers.
[Click here to go to the center's website]
Additionally, the Hartwell Center is not the only New Biology game in Memphis. Naeve also sits on the scientific advisory board of Genome Explorations, a early-stage company that takes advantage of nearby FedEx to provide genomic analysis services globally. Genome Explorations was co-founded by Divyen Patel, the former head of the Affymetrix GeneChip processing core laboratory at St. Jude, and Arno Justman, a former Navy aviator and entrepreneur.
Previous New Biology Economy articles on bird flu:
Thursday, October 20, 2005
Should the Next Weapon in Bird Flu Fight be DNA?Thursday, September 22, 2005
Vietnam Opens Lab Test Facility for Bird Flu, Other Diseases, in Mountain ProvinceThursday, September 29, 2005
Bats Seen as SARS SourceThursday, October 06, 2005
Who Will Manage Quarantines?
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