Event

 The Bioinformatics Workshop 2015 Conference entitled 20th International Bioinformatics Workshop on Virus Evolution and Molecular Epidemiology (VEME) takes place from Sunday August 9 – Friday August 14.

For further details, please click here.

Please note: Some sessions are open to UWI staff and students who are not registered for the conference. For interested persons, sessions highlighted in yellow in this Excel spreadsheet are open to unregistered UWI staff and students. As space may be limited in some sessions, unregistered participants must confirm their interest by email to christine.carrington@sta.uwi.edu (including the date, time and title of the sessions they wish to attend) by Thursday August 6, 2015.  

As part of the Conference, there will be the Official Workshop Launch and Open Lecture by Professor Edward Holmes of University of Sydney, Australia on the topic, Pandemics Past and Present. 

This event takes place at 5.30pm. 

To RSVP, please email veme2015@sta.uwi.edu or call 645-8666 or 662-7072 ext. 4643.  

For a printable version of this information, please click here.  

Abstract

Pandemics Past and Present

Prof. Edward C. Holmes FAA

Marie Bashir Institute for Infectious Disease and Biosecurity, Charles Perkins Centre, School of Biological Sciences and Sydney Medical School, The University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia.

I will present an overview of how genome sequence data can be used to understand the evolution of infectious disease and pandemic emergence.  I will first show how the analysis of ‘ancient DNA’ from archival human remains (including those present in medical collections) can inform on past infectious disease epidemics, focusing on two infamous bacterial diseases – plague and cholera.  Turning to the present, and using current examples of influenza viruses, hantaviruses and coronaviruses, I will show how metagenomics is revolutionizing our understanding of virus biodiversity and evolution, and how phylogenetic methods can be used to help predict the nature of future emerging diseases.