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About the Authors:
Katherine E. E. Johnson
Affiliation: Center for Genomics & Systems Biology, Department of Biology, New York University, New York, New York, United States of America
ORCID http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9226-0672
Timothy Song
Affiliation: Center for Genomics & Systems Biology, Department of Biology, New York University, New York, New York, United States of America
ORCID http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6932-0916
Benjamin Greenbaum
Affiliation: Tisch Cancer Institute, Departments of Genetics and Genomics, Medicine, Oncological Sciences, and Pathology, Icahn School of Medicine of Mt Sinai, New York, New York, United States of America
Elodie Ghedin
* E-mail: [email protected]
Affiliations Center for Genomics & Systems Biology, Department of Biology, New York University, New York, New York, United States of America, Department of Epidemiology, College of Global Public Health, New York University, New York, New York, United States of America
ORCID http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1515-725XCitation: Johnson KEE, Song T, Greenbaum B, Ghedin E (2017) Getting the flu: 5 key facts about influenza virus evolution. PLoS Pathog 13(8): e1006450. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.ppat.1006450
Editor: Rebecca Ellis Dutch, University of Kentucky, UNITED STATES
Published: August 24, 2017
Copyright: © 2017 Johnson et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Funding: The Ghedin lab has been supported by a grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) U01 AI111598. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
Introduction
The year 1918 saw the most famous influenza pandemic-a worldwide epidemic that caused nearly 50 million deaths-when an H1N1 influenza A virus of partial avian origin infected over one-third of the world’s population. Although its exact origins are still under debate, World War I and trade routes are thought to have aided in the circulation of the virus worldwide [1]. Within the last century, there have been 4 pandemics caused by influenza A, with the most recent in 2009 when a swine-like H1N1 subtype virus entered the human population. Increased whole genome sequencing and computational methods have accompanied improved surveillance of bird populations [2] and of human households and communities [3]. This allows for...