Role of the Untranslated Regions of the Influenza A Virus. Influenza A virus

The primary goal of this project is to determine how sequence variation in the UTR’s of the HA and NA impact the replication/fitness of influenza A viruses by focusing analysis on the UTR’s of high yield reassortants used as vaccine seed stocks and selected naturally circulating strains. As part of this project, we will provide complete genomic sequence information, including accurate UTR sequences for approximately 60 viruses. We will also investigate changes in the UTR of HA and NA of a subset of 6-10 reassortants vaccine seeds which have been serially passaged in mammalian cell culture or eggs to determine if the substrate/species used to propagate the viruses selects for changes in the UTRs that enhance growth under specific conditions. Additionally, techniques developed in this project may be incorporated into the influenza genome sequencing pipeline to generate complete UTR data for all new sequencing projects, which would dramatically improve the sequence database.