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Bacteriology and Infectious Diseases 2018 - Bioinformatics in influenza surveillances: From sequence to structure to molecular mechanisms with the FluSurver

Raphael Tze Chuen Lee

 Keywords: Bioinformatics, Influenza, Immunity Bioinformatics can play an important role in infectious disease surveillance and research from epidemiological data processing with geographic and temporal visualization to comparing genome phylogenies and structural modeling of mutations. As a classical example, interest in new influenza outbreaks as well as regular surveillance of circulating seasonal strains produce a constant flow of influenza genome sequences that need to be analyzed and interpreted for epidemiological and phenotypic features. Several steps in typical influenza sequence analysis can be automated and we have been actively developing the free online analysis pipeline FluSurver over the last 6 years to facilitate identification and interpretation of mutations in influenza sequences and link them with possible phenotypic consequences. The tool has already been instrumental in the discovery of new influenza strain variants with altered antiviral susceptibility, host specificity, glycosylation and antigenic properties and is being used by researchers, National Influenza Centres, WHO Collaborating Centres and the GISAID initiative. With the help from the greater infectious disease community, it is feasible to extend this tool for the monitoring and surveillance of other pathogens. The Influenza Research Database is an integrative and comprehensive publicly available database and analysis resource to search, analyze, visualize, save and share data for influenza virus research. IRD is one of the five Bioinformatics Resource Centers (BRC) funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), a component of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which is an agency of the United States Department of Health and Human Services. Bioinformatics can play an important role in infectious disease surveillance and research from epidemiological data processing with geographic and temporal visualization to comparing genome phylogenies and structural modelling of mutations. As a classical example, interest in new influenza outbreaks as well as regular surveillance of circulating seasonal strains produce a constant flow of influenza genome sequences that need to be analysed and interpreted for epidemiological and phenotypic features. Several steps in typical influenza sequence analysis can be automated and we have been actively developing the free online analysis pipeline FluSurver over the last 6 years to facilitate identification and interpretation of mutations in influenza sequences and link them with possible phenotypic consequences. The tool has already been instrumental in the discovery of new influenza strain variants with altered antiviral susceptibility, host specificity, glycosylation and antigenic properties and is being used by researchers, National Influenza Centres, WHO Collaborating Centres and the GISAID initiative. Following an introduction of the tool and example application successes by Dr. Sebastian Maurer-Stroh, a walkthrough demo will be presented by FluSurver key developer Raphael Tze Chuen Lee. Coming from Austria, via Belgium to Singapore, Dr. Sebastian Maurer-Stroh leads a group of experts in computational sequence and structure analysis as senior principal investigator in the A*STAR Bioinformatics Institute (BII) since 2007. With more than 100 publications in the field, he is known for leading the team developing the currently most comprehensive influenza mutation a