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BLASTing Away Viruses!

JSHS · 2024

Ananya Mantri, Ms. Edith Parks · Northeast Lauderdale High School, Meridian, MS

Overview

The purpose of this experiment is to evaluate the effectiveness of vaccine predictions made by the WHO for Influenza outbreaks. This can be applied to real-world situations to enhance the efficiency of vaccination programs and improve public health preparedness. In this experiment, I was testing how often the vaccine is a good match each season, and how often the prediction fails. I hypothesized that there would be a 60- 70% match for Influenza, hypothetically resulting in 30 -40% of the population that would be infected even with the vaccine. To perform this experiment, first ensure your computer has a stable internet connection and create a table to record data. Then, to find antigenic data for Influenza, go to the Flu Activity & Surveillance webpage at The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) website and find the most common influenza strains subtyped for the three most recent seasons as well as the strains in that season's influenza vaccine. Then, using the BLAST tool on the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) website, compare the sequences of each common strain with the vaccine strain using the hemagglutinin and neuraminidase proteins. From this experiment, it was found that my hypothesis was partially correct. The accuracy of the WHO’s vaccine predictions do vary, and some predictions align well with the strains, wi th others not so much. It was found that overall, there was approximately a 50 -60% match, hypothetically resulting in 40-50% of the population that received the vaccine to still be infected.

Competition history

  • JSHS 2024 Category not listed

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Source: Junior Science and Humanities Symposium

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