BEGIN:VCALENDAR
VERSION:2.0
PRODID:-//Talks.cam//talks.cam.ac.uk//
X-WR-CALNAME:Talks.cam
BEGIN:VEVENT
SUMMARY:Seeing the Unseen  - Jordan P. Skittrall\, NIHR Clinical Lecturer 
 in Virology and Honorary Specialty Registrar in Infectious Diseases and Me
 dical Virology\, Division of Virology\, Department of Pathology
DTSTART:20230222T140000Z
DTEND:20230222T150000Z
UID:TALK192047@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Samantha Noel
DESCRIPTION:How do you search for something when you don’t know what siz
 e it is\, what it looks like\, or where it is? One way of gaining new unde
 rstanding about the lifecycles of RNA viruses (a large proportion of all k
 nown viruses) is to search for previously undetected regions in the viral 
 RNA where there is unexpectedly high nucleotide conservation – suggestin
 g that mutations in those regions are for some reason lethal to the virus.
  Because some such regions lack analogues in the host (i.e. are specific t
 o the virus) and because there are high barriers to mutation\, such region
 s are strong candidates to be antiviral drug targets.\n\nMany ways of look
 ing for high conservation presume some foreknowledge of the motifs we are 
 looking for – but to find truly novel biology such methods alone are ina
 dequate. 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 h
 ave applied this method to analysing HIV and predicted previously undescri
 bed structure in the RNA with important consequences for viral function. I
 n doing so I shall take you from open problems in probability theory\, thr
 ough information theory and molecular biology\, to applications in clinica
 l medicine.
LOCATION:CMS\, Meeting Room 15
END:VEVENT
END:VCALENDAR