Blasting Flu viruses

[juju]

hi,

I am doing my science project about how effective is the flu vaccine.
The problem is I don't understand how the process works. How is that I BLAST only the flu vaccine, and then I will have the results of how effective the vaccine is?

And if I have to BLAST both the vaccine and the flu, where am I to find the flu sequence.

juju
Thank you!

Here is the main website!
https://www.sciencebuddies.org/mentorin ... l?from=TSW

[MelissaB]

Juju,

If you can, please keep all your posts in a single thread. It will help us help you better. As the other experts have already said, to see how effective a vaccine was you need to compare its sequence to that of the flu sequences for that year. As the project write-up says, the names of the flu sequences that went around in a particular year can be found at the CDC flu home page (the second link in the bibliography). Once you have the name, you can use the ISD or, better yet, the NCBI site to look up the sequence for that flu isolate. Then you will have both sequences and can see how similar they are. The more similar they are, the more effective we assume the vaccine to be (which is an assumption you probably want to talk about in your discussion, as it may not always be true).