Viral Genomics and Bioinformatics 英文参考文献.docVIP

Viruses 2010, 2, 2587-2593; doi:10.3390/v2122587 OPEN ACCESS viruses ISSN 1999-4915 /journal/viruses Editorial Viral Genomics and Bioinformatics Donald Seto Department of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology, George Mason University, Manassas, VA 20110, USA; E-Mail: dseto@; Tel.: +1-703-993-8403; Fax: +1-703-993-8401 Received: 29 November 2010 / Accepted: 29 November 2010 / Published: 30 November 2010 1. Introduction From the recognition by Ivanovski in 1892 that tobacco mosaic disease is caused and transmitted by fine pore filtrates [1], viruses have been isolated, characterized, identified and studied from animals, plants, protists, bacteria and even other viruses [2,3]. As human and global public health pathogens that can be highly contagious and have devastating morbidity and mortality consequences, viruses are the focus of much research. The difficult challenge has been to define and study a miniscule “being” with the appropriate tools. In the past, these tools often provided only low-resolution views. A first approach to studying an unknown virus is to know exactly its identity, and to place it into context of other related and non-related viruses. For human and public health, this is important as the identity may provide a course of action to limit the effects of the pathogen. Virus identification, characterization and taxonomy are necessarily based on the “best-available” methodology and technology. The “best-available” may not be the ideal method. In the past as well as currently, virus attributes used for identification include measurements of the physical viral structure; biological, biochemical and clinical observations; pathogenic properties, antibody recognition of capsid proteins (immunochemistry); and the physical genetic material (genome), including the particular form of genome, genome hybridization and restriction enzyme digestion patterns [2]. Technolog