written by Eric J. Ma on 2017-04-24 | tags: graduate school thesis defence
My thesis defence announcement has been made to the department!
Abstract
Reassortment is a reticulate evolutionary process that results in genome shuffling; the most prominent virus known to reassort is the influenza A virus. Methods to identify reassortant influenza viruses do not scale well beyond hundreds of isolates at a time, because they rely on phylogenetic reconstruction, a computationally expensive method. This thus hampers our ability to test systematically whether reassortment is associated with host switching events. In this thesis, I use phylogenetic heuristics to develop a new reassortment detection algorithm capable of finding reassortant viruses in tens of thousands viral isolates. Together with colleagues, we then use the algorithm to test whether reassortment events are over-represented in host switching events and whether reassortment is an alternative 'transmission strategy' for viral persistence.
Committee
@article{
ericmjl-2017-thesis-defence,
author = {Eric J. Ma},
title = {Thesis Defence!},
year = {2017},
month = {04},
day = {24},
howpublished = {\url{https://ericmjl.github.io}},
journal = {Eric J. Ma's Blog},
url = {https://ericmjl.github.io/blog/2017/4/24/thesis-defence},
}
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