> There. A single base-pair change, flipping two bits, is perhaps all you need to turn the current less-deadly H1N1 swine flu virus into a more deadly variant.

> There. A single base-pair change, flipping two bits, is perhaps all you need to turn the current less-deadly H1N1 swine flu virus into a more deadly variant. Similar idea: I have a friend in a lab who recently made a synthetic version of a virus (she said she was "resuscitating" the virus). It has a single point mutation. It's normally BSL-4 and causes lethal infection. With the mutation it's supposedly safe to work with and won't enter certain cells. Apparently the polymerase screwed up and altered some part of that gene, or maybe it wasn't mutated in the first place, or maybe the initial sequencing was incorrect. Regardless, I got a terrified message from her saying the synthetic version was replicating in a cell line that it wasn't supposed to. (Fortunately, she had continued to work with it in a containment lab.) Eventually her lab group scraped the study. Before this, I wasn't really concerned about this kind of work.