The next OCBE Biostatistics seminar will fall within the series of Sven Furberg Seminars in Bioinformatics and Statistical Genomics, and will be held on Thursday, June 1st, at 14:30-15:30 in Auditorium 13 (Domus Medica, Oslo).

Jotun Hein, professor of Bioinformatics, Department of Statistics, University of Oxford, UK, will present about
Algorithms for Recombination Detection With an Application to SARS CoV-2

Abstract:  The evolutionary process of genetic recombination has the potential to rapidly change the properties of a viral pathogen, and its presence is a crucial factor to consider in the development of treatments and vaccines. It can also significantly affect the results of phylogenetic analyses and the inference of evolutionary rates. The detection of recombination from samples of sequencing data is a very challenging problem and is further complicated for SARS-CoV-2 by its relatively slow accumulation of genetic diversity. The extent to which recombination is ongoing for SARS-CoV-2 is not yet resolved. To address this, we use a parsimony-based method to reconstruct possible genealogical histories for samples of SARS-CoV-2 sequences, which enables us to pinpoint specific recombination events that could have generated the data. We propose a statistical framework for disentangling the effects of recurrent mutation from recombination in the history of a sample, and hence provide a way of estimating the probability that ongoing recombination is present. We apply this to samples of sequencing data collected in England and South Africa and find evidence of ongoing recombination.

We investigate the probability of recovering the true topology of ancestral recombination graphs (ARGs) under the coalescent with recombination and gene conversion. We explore how sample size and mutation rate affect the inherent uncertainty in reconstructed ARGs; this sheds light on the theoretical limitations of ARG reconstruction methods.

The OCBE Biostatistics seminar series is organized by the Oslo Centre for Biostatistics and Epidemiology and is an arena for presenting new interesting work in biostatistics, both on the methodological and applied side, from researchers in Oslo, from Norway and abroad.

See also: https://www.med.uio.no/imb/english/research/centres/ocbe/events/biostat-seminar/
for updates or for subscribing to the events. If you'd like to be added in the "biostat-ext" mailing list, just let us know.

Last upcoming seminar this semester:

June 15th, 2023: Susanne Strohmaier, Medical University of Vienna, Austria

Welcome!
Best wishes,
Jon Michael Gran, Valeria Vitelli and Manuela Zucknick

Professor Jotun Hein