Science Buddies: "Ask an Expert"

I'm looking for any information or sources of information about Avian influenza or bird flu. I am also wondering if anyone can think of any possible science fair projects to do on it. Thanks so much!!!

Since it has been in the news a lot, and supposedly the 1918 flu epidemic was an avian flu virus (http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/05/health/05cnd-flu.html), you may be able to do a DNA or amino acid sequence analysis (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/BLAST/).

Here's a big resource for sequences, software, and a variety of other thigs:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Database/

You can dig and find out which influenza proteins are involved in binding to and penetrating cells, which are most involved in the host's immune response and, for example, see if there are sequence hotspots that change to overcome immunity. You can compare different strains, different families, do molecular modelling of 3D structures (http://www.openrasmol.org/).

None of these things require you to do any expensive, time consuming, and potentially dangerous handling of actual virus. There's a huge amount of computational biology you can do right on your PC.

Thank You!!