Origins of Swine Flu

The April 30, 2009 online issue of Eurosurveillance features an article by Benjamin Greenbaum, Member in the School of Natural Sciences, former Member (2006-07) in the School of Mathematics Vladimir Trifonov, and former School of Natural Sciences Member (2003-08) Raúl Rabadán, coauthored with Hossein Khiabanian of Columbia University. The article, which grew out of research conducted at Columbia's Department of Biomedical Informatics, Center for Computational Biology and Bioinformatics and the Institute's Simons Center for Systems Biology, reports that preliminary analysis suggests at least two swine ancestors to the current H1N1, one of them related to the triple reassortant viruses isolated in North America in 1998. The complete article, "The origin of the recent swine influenza A(H1N1) virus infecting humans," may be viewed here.