A recent discovery has been made about the H1N1 “swine flu” virus. This virus has been spreading worldwide in recent weeks and could possibly be raised to a pandemic alert level. The discovery made by US researchers is that the swine flu strain has only half the genetic markers found in previous pandemic strains. A study published in BMC Microbiology 2 by Jonathan Allen and Tom Slezak in describes that they found 34 amino acid markers in previously studied pandemic flu strains. In recent weeks, after observing sequences from the H1N1 flu strain, they have found that only half of the 34 markers found in previous strains were present. Despite this discovery, Slezak said that although this strain lacks many of the markers that made other outbreaks deadly, caution should still be taken as a lack of these markers does not mean that the strain will not be a problem. Further research will be required to determine this.
Allen and Slezak used proteomes of past pandemic strains in their study. These proteomes are collections of amino acids made when all an organism’s genes are expressed. Thus, this enabled them to look for the building blocks of proteins that genes of previous strains expressed and looked for patterns that were repeated across different strains. This is how the gene markers in each different strain were determined. These findings are quite important, as they have the potential to make surveillance tools which track new mutations of the flu more effective.
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