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The researchers looked deeper into these observations, in hopes of gaining insight into the mechanisms underlying the high evolutionary rate and extraordinary immunologic plasticity of influenza HA. They probed in more detail the precise codons that are used by the virus to encode the influenza HA1 protein. The discriminated between codons on the basis of volatility. Each three-nucleotide codon is related by a single nucleotide change to nine 'mutational neighbours.' Of those nine mutations, some proportion change the codon to a synonymous codon and some change it to a nonsynonymous one, which directs the incorporation of a different amino acid into the protein. More volatile codons are those for which a larger proportion of those nine mutational neighbours encode an amino acid change. The use of particular codons in a gene at a frequency that is disproportionate to their random selection for encoding a chosen amino acid is termed codon bias. Such bias is common and is influenced by many factors, but here the collaborators found strong evidence for codon bias that was particular for and restricted to the amino acids making up the HA1 epitopes. Remarkably, they observed that influenza employs a disproportionate number of volatile codons in its epitope-coding sequences. There was a bias for the use of codons that had the fewest synonymous mutational neighbours. In other words, influenza HA1 appears to have optimized the speed with which it can change amino acids in its epitopes. Amino acid changes can arise from fewer mutational events. The antibody combining regions are optimized to use codons that have a greater likelihood to undergo nonsynonymous single nucleotide substitutions : they are optimized for rapid evolution.

Michael G Cordingley
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Poverty is apt to strike suddenly like influenza, it is well to have a few memories of extravagance in store for bad times.

Graham Greene, Travels With My Aunt
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Who can stop influenza and tuberculosis? The wealth of high society cannot buy off this evil, for their bored children die alongside everyone else.

Margie Bayer, Goodnight Eleanor
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This emotion I'm feeling now, this is love, right?""I don't know. Is it a longing? Is it a giddy stupid happiness just because you're with me?""Yes," she said."That's influenza," said Miro. "Watch for nausea or diarrhea within a few hours.

Orson Scott Card, Children of the Mind
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There are environmental threats to health; there are internal threats to health - genetic conditions, viral threats, diseases like cancer and Parkinson's. And then there are societal and global ones, like poverty and lack of nutrition. And unknown viral threats - everything from a new kind of influenza to hemorrhagic fever.

Bill Maris
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The dancing sickness took place during the latter part of the fifteenth century. Bubonic plague--the black death--decimated Europe near the end of the fourteenth. Whooping cough near the end of the seventeenth, and the first known outbreaks of influenza near the end of the nineteenth. We've become so used to the idea of the flu--it seems almost like the common cold to us, doesn't it?--that no one but the historians seem to know that a hundred years ago it didn't exist.

Stephen King, The Stand
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In fact, biology is chaos. Biological systems are the product not of logic but of evolution, an inelegant process. Life does not choose the logically best design to meet a new situation. It adapts what already exists...The result, unlike the clean straight lines of logic, is often irregular, messy.

John M. Barry, The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History
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Another explanation for the failure of logic and observation alone to advance medicine is that unlike, say, physics, which uses a form of logic - mathematics - as its natural language, biology does not lend itself to logic. Leo Szilard, a prominent physicist, made this point when he complained that after switching from physics to biology he never had a peaceful bath again. As a physicist he would soak in the warmth of a bathtub and contemplate a problem, turn it in his mind, reason his way through it. But once he became a biologist, he constantly had to climb out of the bathtub to look up a fact.

John M. Barry, The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History
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