BLASTing Flu Viruses

[juju]

Hello,

I am doing a science fair project on the effectiveness of certain flu vaccines.
The problem is I do not understand the results.

Please explain it to me.

The main website where all the links are is :

https://www.sciencebuddies.org/mentorin ... l?from=TSW

Thank you

[barretttomlinson]

Hi juju:

You have asked a question that is too general for me to answer. It would help a lot if you could ask a more specific question - what exactly do you not understand?

I am somewhat concerned you picked a project that was more ambitious than you were prepared to tackle. This project is rated a 9 on a 10 point scale(very hard), and you are posting in a middle school area. What background do you have in this topic? Have you really read and understood the experiment writeup, and that includes reading and understanding the bibliography links, and researching the background questions in the writeup? Now is the time to do so if you have not already done it.

A science fair project is a great opportunity to learn neat stuff on your own, a skill you will use more and more as you progress in school. You can find many of your own answers rather easily using the google search engine (at http://www.google.com ). If you can phrase a specific question in just a few words, try typing the question in the google search box and hitting the search button. I almost always get a great answer in one of the sites the search engine returns when I do this. If you don’t succeed on the first try, try to rephrase your question and try again. Sometimes you have to go to the second or third page of the search results, or try several search phrases, to find the right site to best answer your question.

If none of this stuff makes sense to you I suggest talking to your science teacher. He/she may either be able to help you over the tough spot or be able to suggest a project that is better matched to your current level of study.

If you can more precisely state a specific question that you do not understand, repost and we will try to help you get an answer.

This is a really, really cool project. I do not think it could have been done even by college students just a few years ago. You are having the opportunity to explore “state of the art” science before even starting college! So, if you are really curious about it, hang in there and go for it. Just realize that you may have to do a lot of background reading and ask a lot of questions before it starts making much sense, but it will be worth it in the end.

Good luck and have fun exploring!

Barrett Tomlinson

[adance]

Hi juju,

It would help if you post a more specific question--I'm not sure what "results" you're trying to understand.

I'm guessing that the basic question you're asking is, was a particular flu vaccine effective? For that, you can compare the sequence of the vaccine to the sequence of the flu that actually made people sick that year. Scientists try to design vaccines that match, but it's hard to do because they have to come up with a vaccine BEFORE everybody starts getting sick with the flu.

When you blast a particular sequence, the results will have scores that tell you how close a match it is to other sequences. The resulting matches near the top of the list are the closest. There is also a way to align two sequences against each other, then you can look at the whole sequence and see exactly where two sequences are different. Then, for example, you could count the number of bases that were different to get a simple measure of how close the vaccine and the virus are.

One interesting twist on this project would be to compare vaccines and flu sequences for several different years, and then see if more people got the flu in the years with the not-so-close vaccines. I bet you can find that info on the CDC website. Although, of course, the same number of people might not get vaccinated in every year.

Good luck, and post again if you have more specific questions we can answer.

Amber