As the world’s most infamous flu pandemic (often referred to as the Spanish flu) raged from 1918–1920, scientists had very few tools available to help them combat or understand the disease. Researchers didn’t even know that a virus was responsible for the disease until the causal agent was finally isolated in a lab in 1930. In the years and decades that followed, improving technology has allowed researchers to look back and learn more about the often-fatal pathogen, but questions remain about the pandemic’s course, especially regarding how and why the virus changed over time.
Research published today (May 10) in Nature Communications fills in some of the gaps in that body of knowledge: researchers managed to extract viral genomes from tissue samples of people who caught the 1918 pandemic flu in different years to show how the virus mutated over time to adapt to the human immune system. They conclude ...
