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14 - Information resources: learning about flu viruses

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2012

Tore Samuelsson
Tore Samuelsson
Affiliation:
Göteborgs Universitet, Sweden
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Summary

All science is either physics or stamp collecting.

(Ernest Rutherford)

The 1918 flu pandemic, also referred to as the Spanish flu, was a devastating infectious disease. It is estimated that 50 million people, about 3% of the world's population at the time, died of the disease. About 500 million people were infected. The causative agent was an influenza virus. In this chapter we will learn more about these viruses. We will make use of highly significant molecular biology databases and bioinformatics tools. These are useful not only for learning about influenza viruses, but are widely used to explore just about any topic in biology.

Short history of sequence databases

A vast amount of information is collected by projects around the world designed to characterize genomes, genes and proteins. The development with respect to DNA sequencing is particularly remarkable. One important task in bioinformatics is to store all of this information in databases and, importantly, to make it available to the scientific community for downloading and analysis. Numerous dedicated individuals working on database projects are the unsung heroes of bioinformatics and molecular biology (see also the quotation on stamp collecting above).

Type
Chapter
Information
Genomics and Bioinformatics
An Introduction to Programming Tools for Life Scientists
 , pp. 173 - 197
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2012

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References

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