Swine flue outbreak. Swine flu names evolving faster than swine flu itself

Genetic polymorphisms in drug targets have emerged as critical determinants of interindividual variability in drug response and toxicity. Pharmacogenomic investigations increasingly focus on identifying these variations to personalize and optimize therapeutic interventions. A drug target may be a receptor, enzyme, or signaling protein involved in pharmacologic responses or disease-related pathways. While early pharmacogenetic studies focused primarily on drug metabolism, current research...

Influenza is an acute, highly communicable viral disease that affects the respiratory tract and is responsible for seasonal epidemics worldwide. Influenza A is the most prevalent type associated with widespread outbreaks and is subtyped based on two surface glycoproteins: hemagglutinin (H) and neuraminidase (N), as in H1N1. These glycoproteins are essential for viral infectivity, transmission, and immune recognition. Transmission occurs primarily through respiratory droplets and contaminated...

Cells are sometimes infected by more than one virus at once. When two viruses disassemble to expose their genomes for replication in the same cell, similar regions of their genomes can pair together and exchange sequences in a process called recombination. Alternatively, viruses with segmented genomes can swap segments in a process called reassortment.

Bacterial pathogens depend on precise and efficient DNA replication to sustain infection. Two type II topoisomerases—DNA gyrase and topoisomerase IV—are critical to this process, as they resolve DNA supercoiling and unlink chromosomes during replication. Fluoroquinolones, synthetic derivatives of quinolones, exploit this mechanism by stabilizing the transient DNA–enzyme cleavage complex, preventing strand religation, and causing lethal double-strand breaks. These antibiotics are selectively...

A mutation is a change in the sequence of bases of DNA or RNA in a genome. Some mutations occur during replication of the genome due to errors made by the polymerase enzymes that replicate DNA or RNA. Unlike DNA polymerase, RNA polymerase is prone to errors because it is not capable of “proofreading” its work. Viruses with RNA-based genomes, like HIV, therefore accrue mutations faster than viruses with DNA-based genomes. Because mutation and recombination provide the raw material for adaptive...

During most eukaryotic translation processes, the small 40S ribosome subunit scans an mRNA from its 5' end until it encounters the first start AUG codon. The large 60S ribosomal subunit then joins the smaller one to initiate protein synthesis. The location of the translation initiation is largely determined by the nucleotides near the start codon as there may be multiple translation initiation sites present on the mRNA.  Marilyn Kozak discovered that the sequence RCCAUGG (where R stands for...