Molecular biocontainment for the flu
A team from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and the University of Maryland, College Park has engineered a flu virus that is transmissible among ferrets but not humans.1 The microRNA-based containment strategy provides a safeguard in case of accidental release or intentional misuse of viruses used in influenza research and could help study how pandemics originate, although the stability of the engineered strain and how well it recapitulates wild-type virus biology have yet to be thoroughly determined.
Ever since the emergence of the H5N1 strain in 1997, influenza researchers have sought to determine what mutations confer human-to-human transmissibility. The goal is to use the information to monitor circulating avian strains to preempt or better contain the next pandemic...