Identifying virulence gene with bioinformatics?

Question

i have some very elementary ideas abt using basic bioinformatics tools.i need guidance for identifying the virulence of a certain virus.Hope u can help

Answer 1

It's a little difficult to answer without knowing what virus you're working with. Essentially bioinformatics allows us to use existing sequence databases to fish out commonalities and look for patterns. For example, if your virus falls into a well characterized viral family with lots of sequence information you may be able to fish out possible virulence factors simply by comparing the sequence of your virus with known virulence factors of related viruses.

However, at best bioinformatics only gives you an idea of good targets to look at. To really confirm that the candidate gene(s) derived from bioinformatics tools is related to virulence you need to do experimental work to back it up.