Prof. Robert J. Woods, President and co-Founder, and collaborators reported in PLoS Pathogens on Thursday, June 15th that three mutations switch avian H7N9 influenza to human-type receptor specificity and provide an explanation for the unprecedented incidence of influenza transmission from infected poultry to humans. The team included Dr. Oliver C. Grant from Prof. Woods academic group at the Complex Carbohydrate Research Center where the structural modeling work was done.
Source: de Vries RP, Peng W, Grant OC, Thompson AJ, Zhu X, et al. (2017) Three mutations switch H7N9 influenza to human-type receptor specificity. PLOS Pathogens 13(6): e1006390. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.ppat.1006390
http://journals.plos.org/plospathogens/article?id=10.1371/journal.ppat.1006390
