Thursday, May 24, 2012

Researchers take virus-tracking software worldwide

Tuesday, May 22, 2012

A biomedical informatics researcher who tracks dangerous viruses as they spread around the globe has restructured his innovative tracking software to promote even wider use of the program around the world.

Associate Professor Daniel Janies, PhD, an expert in computational genomics at the Wexner Medical Center at The Ohio State University (OSU), is working with software engineers at the Ohio Supercomputer Center (OSC) to expand the reach of SUPRAMAP (supramap.org), a Web-based application that synthesizes large, diverse datasets so that researchers can better understand the spread of infectious diseases across hosts and geography. By separating SUPRAMAP's client application from the underlying server software, the goal is to reconfigure the server in a way that researchers and public safety officials can develop other front-end applications that draw on the logic and computing resources of SUPRAMAP.

Janies and his colleagues at Ohio State, the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH), and OSC developed SUPRAMAP in 2007 to track the spread and evolution of pandemic (H1N1) and avian influenza (H5N1).

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Now that the H5N1 papers detailing transmission among mammals have been published, we can next pinpoint the natural geographic distribution of key sets of mutations that could lead to human-to-human transmission. Our maps will allow scientists to better deploy public health resources to protect citizens and forces in the field."


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