Toolbox

Methods used to study viruses

Viral Bioinformatics: Multiple sequence alignment – Jalview

This week€™s addition to the virology toolbox was written by Chris Upton The Jalview package: a multiple alignment editor. This software is primarily aimed at the alignment of protein sequences. Some of the key features are: It allows you to edit the alignment It has functions to display associated protein structures It can connect to …

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Detecting viral proteins in infected cells or tissues by immunostaining

Many virological techniques are based on the specificity of the antibody-antigen reaction. Examples in our virology toolbox include western blot analysis and ELISA. While very useful, these methods cannot be used to visualize viral proteins in infected cells or tissues. To do that we must turn to immunostaining. In direct immunostaining (illustrated), an antibody that …

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Viral bioinformatics: Recombination

This week€™s addition to the virology toolbox was written by Danielle Coulson and Chris Upton Comparing genomes of viral strains can provide very useful insight into evolutionary relationships. Recombination, defined by Posada et al (2001) as the exchange of genetic information between two nucleotide sequences, is quite common in many viruses. Because recombination accounts for …

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