The results of the project could lead to major insights into the bird flu virus known as H5N1, the researchers said.
The project produced 70 million bases of sequence information leading to DNA sequences for 2,196 genes and 169 complete bird flu genomes from the St Jude collection, including representatives of all known subtypes of the virus including H5 bird flu.
Preliminary analysis of these data and development of new analysis software has led to the discovery of new forms of bird flu genes, how these viruses evolve through time and the identification of genes that travel together through evolution.
The St Jude research also made an intriguing discovery that avian influenza viruses have a particular molecular feature that human influenza viruses do not have, which may cause them to be more toxic when infecting human cells.
“The major accomplishment of this project is that it gives the scientific community significantly more new data and analytical tools to use in the study of these potentially very dangerous viruses,” said Dr John Obenauer, a Bioinformatics associate research scientist at St Jude’s Hartwell Center. “In the future, that might lead to effective strategies for controlling outbreaks of these viruses in birds and humans.” Obenauer is first author of the paper.