Databases

Last night, the phone rang at 9:22 pm. I quickly glanced at the caller ID. Hmmm. Why is the Seattle School district calling us at this time of night?

Apparently the swine flu has come to Seattle and the school district thought we should know.

Those messages are helpful if you're a parent, but they don't tell much about the rest of the world.

Health Map is a really wonderful, user-friendly, resource for following the epidemic.

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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 trees

We can get the genome sequences, piece by piece, as I described in earlier, but the NCBI has other tools that are useful, too.

The Influenza Virus Resource will let us pick sequences, align them, and make trees so we can quickly compare the sequences to ... Read more

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 1. Go to the NCBI, find the Influenza Virus Resource page and follow the link to: 04/27/2009: Newest swine influenza A (H1N1) sequences. 2. You'll see a page that looks like this: ... Read more

I'm a big of learning from data. There are many things we can learn about swine flu and other kinds of flu by using public databases. In digital biology activity 1, we learned about the kinds of creatures that can get flu. Personally, I'm a little skeptical about the blowfly, but... Now, you might wonder, what kinds of flu do these different creatures get? Are they all getting H1N1, or do they get different variations? What are H and N anyway? We can discuss all of these, but for now, lets see what kinds of flu strains infect different kinds of creatures. Activity 2. What ... Read more

Genome sequences from California and Texas isolates of the H1N1 swine flu are already available for exploration at the NCBI. Let's do a bit of digital biology and see what we can learn. Activity 1. What kinds of animals get the flu? For the past few years we've been worrying about avian (bird). Now, we're hearing about swine (pig) flu. All of this news might you wonder just who gets the flu besides pigs, birds, and humans. We can find out by looking at the data. Over the past few years, researchers have been sequencing influenza genomes and depositing ... Read more

I suppose I should have expected this. I thought it might be fun to see what the databases had to say about turkeys. So, I queried the NCBI databases, found a taxonomy reference, and started clicking related links to see pictures of the different species. Why? Because it would be great to see what the different species of turkies look like and compare them. Here's a species of wild turkey that I didn't expect to find.

Do mosquitoes get the mumps? Part V. A general method for finding interesting things in GenBank This is the last in a five part series on an unexpected discovery of a paramyxovirus in mosquitoes and a general method for finding other interesting things. In this last part, I discuss a general method for finding novel things in GenBank and how this kind of project could be a good sort of discovery, inquiry-based project for biology, microbiology, or bioinformatics students. I. The back story ... Read more

Part IV. Assembling the details and making the case for a novel paramyxovirus This is the fourth in a five part series on an unexpected discovery of a paramyxovirus in a mosquito. In this part, we take a look at all the evidence we can find and try to figure out how a gene from a virus came to be part of the Aedes aegypti genome.

Part III. Serendipity strikes when we Blink In which we find an unexpected result when we Blink while looking at the mumps polymerase. This is the third in a five part series on an unexpected discovery of a paramyxovirus in mosquitoes. And yes, this is where the discovery happens. I. The back story from the genome record II. What do the mumps proteins do? And how do we find out? III. ... Read more

Part II. What do mumps proteins do? And how do we find out? This is the second in a five part series on an unexpected discovery of a paramyxovirus in mosquitoes, and a general method for finding interesting things. I. The back story from the genome record II. What do the mumps proteins do? And how do we find out? III. Serendipity strikes when we Blink. IV. ... Read more