Divergent evolution of hemagglutinin and neuraminidase genes in recent influenza A:H3N2 viruses isolated in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Limited information is available concerning the molecular drift of the influenza neuraminidase (NA) genes. We report on the genetic variability of the NA gene from 31 influenza A:H3N2 viruses isolated in the Province of Québec (Canada) during the last three flu seasons (1997-2000). Amino acid substitutions within the NA protein were observed at rates of 1.01% and 0.45% between strains of the 1997-1998 and 1998-1999 seasons and between those of the 1998-1999 and 1999-2000 seasons, respectively. In most strains (28/31), amino acid changes occurred within at least one of four codons (197, 339, 370, and 401) previously implicated as antigenic sites. The 8 functional and 10 framework residues that compose the catalytic site of the NA enzyme were completely conserved over the study period. All isolates contained the seven conserved asparagine-linked glycosylation sites found in the NA of the progenitor A/Hong Kong/8/68 strain. In addition, most strains (30/31) had an eighth potential glycosylation site at position 329, whereas a ninth one was found at position 93 in 16 strains. The NA of all strains in this study was related to that of the vaccine strain A/Beijing/353/89, whereas the HA genes of these strains were related to the A/Beijing/32/92 vaccine strain. Thus, it appears that recent influenza strains continue to evolve from a reassortant produced during the cocirculation of the two above variants. Interestingly, some strains whose HA genes were closely related showed significant differences in their NA genes and conversely. This study confirms the importance of analyzing both the NA and the HA genes to assess the evolution of recent influenza epidemic strains.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".