Influenza Virus Genomes Now Completed and Publicly Accessible

The Influenza Genome Sequencing Project, initiated in 2004, has been carried out at the NIAID-funded Microbial Sequencing Center managed by The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR) of Rockville, Maryland. Recently, growing sequencing capacity has enabled the production rate to increase to more than 200 viral genomes per month. Eclipsing today’s milestone of 2,000 genomes, the microbial sequencing center will continue to rapidly sequence more influenza strains and isolates and will make all the sequence data freely available to the scientific community and the public through GenBank, an Internet-accessible database of genetic sequences maintained by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) at NIH’s National Library of Medicine, another major contributor to the project.

More information about the Influenza Genome Sequencing Project and access to the influenza virus sequence data is available at
* NIAID’s Influenza Genome Sequencing Project: http://www.niaid.nih.gov/dmid/genomes/mscs/influenza.htm
* TIGR’s Influenza Virus Genome Project: http://msc.tigr.org/infl_a_virus/index.shtml
* GenBank: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Genbank/

Visit PandemicFlu.gov (http://www.pandemicflu.gov/) for one-stop access to U.S. Government information on avian and pandemic flu.

CONTACT:
Jason Socrates Bardi
301-402-166

Message posted by: Rashmi Nemade