Omicron Variant: Prevalence, Transmissibility, and Pathogenicity

Amino acid substitutions in PB1 of avian influenza viruses influence pathogenicity and transmissibility in chickens.

UNLABELLED Amino acid substitutions were introduced into avian influenza virus PB1 in order to characterize the interaction between polymerase activity and pathogenicity. Previously, we used recombinant viruses containing the hemagglutinin (HA) and neuraminidase (NA) genes from the highly pathogenic avian influenza virus (HPAIV) H5N1 strain and other internal genes from two low-pathogenicity av...

Pathogenicity and Transmissibility of North American Triple Reassortant Swine Influenza A Viruses in Ferrets

North American triple reassortant swine (TRS) influenza A viruses have caused sporadic human infections since 2005, but human-to-human transmission has not been documented. These viruses have six gene segments (PB2, PB1, PA, HA, NP, and NS) closely related to those of the 2009 H1N1 pandemic viruses. Therefore, understanding of these viruses' pathogenicity and transmissibility may help to identi...

Pathogenicity and transmissibility of reassortant H9 influenza viruses with genes from pandemic H1N1 virus.

Both H9N2 avian influenza and 2009 pandemic H1N1 viruses (pH1N1) are able to infect humans and swine, which has raised concerns that novel reassortant H9 viruses with pH1N1 genes might be generated in these hosts by reassortment. Although previous studies have demonstrated that reassortant H9 viruses with pH1N1 genes show increased virulence in mice and transmissibility in ferrets, the virulenc...

Omicron Delta Epsilon

Common Pitfalls and Novel Opportunities for Predicting Variant Pathogenicity

The prediction of missense variant pathogenicity is normally performed using analyses of multiple sequence alignments optionally augmented with analyses of the (predicted) protein structure. The most straightforward way, though, is to search the literature to see whether this variant has already been described. Variant data from homologous proteins are also valuable because mutations in a homol...