Word: kawaoka
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...team of scientists from the U.S., Indonesia and Japan, led by virologist Yoshihiro Kawaoka at the University of Wisconsin - Madison, combined a strain of the deadly H5N1 avian virus with strains of H3N2 human seasonal flu, creating 254 new, mutated viruses. By injecting them in lab mice, researchers found that some of the hybrid viruses were both deadly (like bird flu) and transmissible (like seasonal human flu) - the kind of genetically mutated superflu viruses that experts have been warning about for decades. (See how to prevent illness...
Webster assigned a young scientist, Yoshihiro Kawaoka, to try to figure out how the virus transformed itself into such a "hot" pathogen. Kawaoka, now a professor of virology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, compared the genetic structure of viruses from the first and second waves and found only a single, extremely subtle change in the H gene. The two viruses differed by just one nucleotide--one of 1,700 nucleotides that made up the gene...
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