Gytis Dudas’s paper on “Reassortment between influenza B lineages…” has just been published in Molecular Biology and Evolution. As discussed in March’s blog post, we used full genome sequences of the two main lineages or “species” of influenza B virus (B/Victoria and B/Yamagata) to assess patterns of gene reassortment, in which genes from one lineage introgress into the other lineage’s genetic background during mixed infection events. We find interesting patterns in which some genes move readily between lineages, while other genes maintain separate identities.

I’m very proud of the open science effort here. We’ve had this paper up on the arXiv since March and have tracked reviews and our responses publicly on GitHub. Gytis has also supplied all data and scripts to run the analysis and generate figures in the public GitHub repository.