Detection of mammalian virulence determinants in highly pathogenic avian influenza H5N1 viruses: multivariate analysis of published data.

ABSTRACT: Highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) virus H5N1 infects water and land fowl and can infect and cause mortality in mammals, including humans. However, HPAI H5N1 strains are not equally virulent in mammals, and some strains have been shown to cause only mild symptoms in experimental infections. Since most experimental studies of the basis of virulence in mammals have been small in scale, we undertook a meta-analysis of available experimental studies and used Bayesian graphical models (BGM) to increase the power of inference. We applied text-mining techniques to identify 27 individual studies that experimentally determined pathogenicity in HPAI H5N1 strains comprising 69 complete genome sequences. Amino acid sequence data in all 11 genes were coded as binary data for the presence or absen

SUBMITTER: Lycett SJ 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC2748028 | biostudies-literature | 2009 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature