Microbiologia Médica e Diagnóstico

Bioinformatic Analyses of 2009-2010 Pandemic H1N1 Influenza A Hemagglutinin Subsets

Abstract

William A Thompson and Joel K Weltman

We report here an analysis of mutations in the 2009-2010 pandemic H1N1 influenza Ahemagglutinin gene (HA) based upon information entropy (H), Mutual Information (MI) and geography. The purpose of this study is to determine whether the processes that dominated the evolution of the pandemic virus were either non-random or random. The complete pandemic dataset was bisected into two subsets according to the nucleotide occupying the position of maximum H. The resulting subsets were almost disjoint with respect to overall H distribution, with correlation of H less than that of randomly formed subsets. It was further found that MI between the two nucleotide positions of greatest H was associated with an asymmetric, non-random distribution of mutant counts. The cumulative distributions of pandemic HA sequences from 23 geographic locations world-wide were represented by a system of equations that yielded sequence distributions that were in concordance with available epidemiological/clinical data. It is concluded that the non-random distributions and correlations observed for the HA gene in this research reflect non-random, deterministic biological forces that influenced the evolutionary trajectory of the 2009 – 2010 H1N1 pandemic influenza virus.