Roar, Lions, Roar!

Wow, look at these clean cut, fine looking young men.  These are the guys who figured out the genetic origins of the H1N1 virus, and they work at Columbia University, my alma mater.  Dudes, I’m so impressed.  I don’t even think I knew people like this worked at my old college, as I spent most of my time there hanging out with boho freaks who liked to get high and sneak into buildings at night.  But you know, I was pretty good at dissecting novels.  I don’t think I ever would have crossed paths with the likes of Columbia professor Paul Rabadan, who:

spent his early career describing black holes in outer space at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. He had tired of that work about four years ago, though, so he studied biology in his free time and redirected his methods of mathematical analysis toward a poorly understood disease: swine flu.

Oh sure, get a little free time, study biology. We’ve all been there. Black holes are so boring, after all.

Unfortunately, I am having trouble posting the incredibly cool diagram that shows the genetic development of the swine flu, but please take a look at it.  It’s fun to watch the pig cartoon get bigger and bigger as the virus becomes mostly all pig.  I kid you not; that’s how this is illustrated.

Rabadan hired a team including two physicists, an astronomer, and a computer scientist to examine how the flu genomes change over time.  These guys were not doctors or biologists, just really great at math.

Last year, Rabadan’s team began analyzing hundreds of swine flu gene sequences, dating back 90 years, held in public databases overseen by the NIH’s National Center for Biotechnology Information. His team looked at the unique genetic blueprints of these viruses against one another, examining how they had mutated and reassorted. Rabadan’s group quickly published some intriguing findings, demonstrating, for instance, that particular genes in swine flu are more likely than others to mutate or to nudge their way into a reassorted virus. Rabadan can’t explain this tendency, but the observation places him on the cutting edge of evolutionary biology.

All this work turned out to be very meaningful when swine flu first broke out in Mexico, as this team was able to determine the H1N1 virus’s genetic origins. Oh, and it was a cake walk:

“The math was actually quite simple in this case,” says Hossein Khiabanian, a postdoctoral researcher in Rabadan’s lab who earned his PhD in astrophysics from Brown. “Basically, we made long lists showing the 13,000 nucleotides of each flu sequence and then determined which viruses shared the largest numbers of nucleotides.”

Thanks, Hossein. I will definitely try this out when I get some of that free time.

Okay, actually, the project took four days, with these guys working round the clock, and then they figured it out:

The group’s findings, published the following week in the online journal Eurosurveillance and later in the New England Journal of Medicine, revealed that this new version of H1N1 resulted from a recent genetic reassortment, and an odd one, at that, to have jumped into humans — not a combination of a human flu with a pig flu, but a mix of two flu strains endemic to pigs. Each of the parent strains had infected humans on rare occasions in the past, usually causing mild illness, but neither had been known to spread from person to person.

Among the amazing things you will learn in this article: there are only a few animals regularly affected by the flu virus: “birds, pigs, dogs, horses, ferrets, whales, and humans.”

Stop, you had me at ferrets.

Hooray for cute Ivy League boys who figure out complicated science stuff.