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Science 15 September 2006:
Vol. 313. no. 5793, p. 1573
DOI: 10.1126/science.1131729
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Technical Comments

Comment on "Large-Scale Sequence Analysis of Avian Influenza Isolates"

Edward C. Holmes,1 David J. Lipman,2* Dmitriy Zamarin,3 Jonathan W. Yewdell4

Obenauer et al. (Research Articles, 17 March 2006, p. 1576) reported that the influenza A virus PB1-F2 gene is evolving under strong positive selection, as documented by an extremely high ratio of the number of nonsynonymous nucleotide substitutions to the number of synonymous substitutions (dN/dS). However, we show that this observation is likely to be an artifact related to the location of PB1-F2 in the +1 reading frame of the PB1 gene.

1 Center for Infectious Disease Dynamics, Department of Biology, The Pennsylvania State University, Mueller Laboratory, University Park, PA 16802, USA.
2 National Center for Biotechnology Information, National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD 20894, USA.
3 Department of Microbiology, Mount Sinai School of Medicine, New York, NY 10029, USA.
4 Laboratory of Viral Diseases, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD 20892, USA.

* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: lipman{at}ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

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Science. ISSN 0036-8075 (print), 1095-9203 (online)