Shiloh
Editor, Senior Moderator
Source: http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2011/02/does-bird-flu-swine-flu-superflu.html?ref=ra
Does Bird Flu + Swine Flu = Superflu?
by Jennifer Carpenter on 28 February 2011, 3:03 PM |
...The human influenza virus H1N1 that caused the 2009 flu pandemic, and H9N2, an avian influenza virus that is endemic in bird populations in Asia, are close cousins?close enough that they can swap genes if they find themselves in the same cell, resulting in new viruses that are a patchwork of the parent strains...
...So instead of waiting and seeing, researchers have played matchmaker and thrust the two viruses together in a test tube. A team in China generated 127 hybrid viruses and injected each one into lab mice. More than half of the hybrids were as good as their parent strains at infecting the mice, and eight of them proved to be more pathogenic, the team led by Jinhua Liu of the China Agricultural University in Beijing reports online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences...
Does Bird Flu + Swine Flu = Superflu?
by Jennifer Carpenter on 28 February 2011, 3:03 PM |
...The human influenza virus H1N1 that caused the 2009 flu pandemic, and H9N2, an avian influenza virus that is endemic in bird populations in Asia, are close cousins?close enough that they can swap genes if they find themselves in the same cell, resulting in new viruses that are a patchwork of the parent strains...
...So instead of waiting and seeing, researchers have played matchmaker and thrust the two viruses together in a test tube. A team in China generated 127 hybrid viruses and injected each one into lab mice. More than half of the hybrids were as good as their parent strains at infecting the mice, and eight of them proved to be more pathogenic, the team led by Jinhua Liu of the China Agricultural University in Beijing reports online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences...
