This research will be done at the University of Rochester and the Polish Academy of Sciences Institute of Bioorganic Chemistry in Poznan, Poland. The work will be in collaboration with Prof. Douglas H. Turner at the University of Rochester as an extension of NIH Grant No. RO1GM22939, 8-15-2008 to 7-31-2012, and will include additional collaborators at the University of Rochester (D.H. Mathews, S.D. Kennedy, and B. Kim) and at the State University of New York at Buffalo (M.D. Disney). The research will be done by Dr. Elzbieta Kierzek, who is the equivalent of an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Bioorganic Chemistry in Poznan. The goals of the work are to improve methods for predicting and determining the RNA secondary structures of influenza virus and to discover compounds that can lead to therapeutics for influenza RNA. PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE: Viruses with RNA genomes are responsible for many diseases, including influenza. This project studies methods to determine rapidly the structures of influenza RNA and to discover compounds capable of therapeutically targeting the RNA.