The virus isolated from the second patient of swine flu in the Netherlands has an interesting mutation in a gene called PB2 that could mean? the virus has become more to spread from person to person, a team of Dutch researchers reported Friday ProMED, a disease outbreak surveillance system. But they are the first to recognize that this could be a red herring.
The virus isolated from the patient, a 53 year old woman who developed the first symptoms of flying home from Cancun, Mexico, April 30, has a variation at position 677 of the PB2 gene, which encodes polymerase protein of the virus. Following the modification, an amino acid called glutamic acid in the protein chain is replaced by another called glycine.
interests "scientific flu this particular region of the PB2 gene has long piqued, said Marcel Jonges, a researcher at the Dutch National Institute for Public Health and the Environment (RIVM) in Bilthoven. Dozens of studies have suggested that a transfer to a position near-627-can make the H5N1 bird flu virus more virulent and more transmissible between humans. And last year, a study PloS Pathogens suggested that a change at position 677 might do the same. Dutch patient, said Jonges, is the first swine flu cases in which the latter change was seen.
Oliver Pybus of Oxford University, one of the authors on PLoS Pathogens paper, called the findings "intriguing" but he warned that the mutation could be devoid of meaning. We need more laboratory studies, for example, in animals, to show that the mutation does make a difference, he said. Jonges agrees, and these studies are underway in the laboratory flu virologist Ron Fouchier at Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam, he said. "But we wanted to get this conclusion as soon as possible so that other people can look for it, too," he adds.
Very few PB2 sequence data was collected in the swine flu to date, Jonges said, because most scientists are focusing on genes hemagglutinin and neuraminidase, the famous H and N that sit outside of the virus. The PB2 gene has not yet been discussed on a new wiki page Pybus and other scientists analyze genetic information on the swine flu as it comes in. More researchers should begin sequencing the PB2 gene said Jonges, and especially the region between positions 0 and 700, which seems to play a role in adaptation to human hosts.
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