BioCentury
ARTICLE | Tools & Techniques

Fly Screen for Flu Targets

August 7, 2008 7:00 AM UTC

A paper in Nature describes an RNAi screening strategy in Drosophila that could yield new host and viral targets to prevent or treat influenza infection, and possibly other viral infections.1 But opinions vary over whether the method is superior to use of human cell lines.

The research team included scientists from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Airlangga University, the University of Tokyo and Kobe University. The team was led by Yoshihiro Kawaoka, professor of virology at Wisconsin-Madison and at Tokyo...