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SUMMARY:Seeing the unseen: informatic approaches to find\, characterise an
 d drug conserved regions of nucleic acid in RNA viruses - Jordan Skittrall
  (Department of Pathology\, University of Cambridge)
DTSTART:20220216T140000Z
DTEND:20220216T150000Z
UID:TALK163741@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Samantha Noel
DESCRIPTION:How do you search for something when you don't know what size 
 it is\, what it looks like\, or where it is?  One way of gaining new under
 standing about the lifecycles of RNA viruses (a large proportion of all kn
 own viruses) is to search for previously undetected regions in the viral R
 NA where there is unexpectedly high nucleotide conservation - suggesting t
 hat mutations in those regions are for some reason lethal to the virus.  B
 ecause some such regions lack analogues in the host (i.e. are specific to 
 the virus) and because there are high barriers to mutation\, such regions 
 are strong candidates to be antiviral drug targets.\n\nMany ways of lookin
 g for high conservation presume some foreknowledge of the motifs we are lo
 oking for - but to find truly novel biology such methods alone are inadequ
 ate.  I shall describe a way of approaching this problem\, which turns out
  to be related to the properties of random walks.  I shall show how we hav
 e applied this method to analysing HIV and predicted previously undescribe
 d structure in the RNA with important consequences for viral function.  In
  doing so I shall take you from open problems in probability theory\, thro
 ugh information theory and molecular biology\, to applications in clinical
  medicine.
LOCATION:CMS\, Meeting Room 15
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