On November 12, 2009 Katia Koelle will be leading a discussion on Derivation of a dimensionless number for understanding and predicting viral phylogenies.

Location: 4219 French Family Science Center

Time: 1:00 – 2:00 pm

Abstract: Studies of viral evolution have traditionally been both pathogen and host specific. Determining how a specific virus x evolves in a specific host population y is of course an important avenue of research. However, we are now at a point in time when we can synthesize across these research findings to identify general patterns of viral evolution and what processes shape them. An effective approach towards the identification of these general patterns and processes requires more than listing specific examples and qualitatively categorizing them – it requires a quantitative framework. Here, we detail the development of one possible framework, by deriving a dimensionless number to understand patterns of viral evolution and the processes driving them. We also describe an alternative to this dimensionless number approach. This is work in progress, so feedback on which approach is more effective and why would be very useful at this stage.

This work is in collaboration with Virginia Pasour (former Biology post-doc) and Jonathan Mattingly (Math).