Title: Data Curation and SARS-CoV-2: population genomics of 2.5 million genomes
Presenter(s): David Ussery
Date presented: July 28, 2021
Description
Covid-19 has become a global pandemic, and recently Arkansas has seen a dramatic increase in number of cases, mainly due to a new variant (“Delta”). Using a population genomics approach, we are in the third wave with the current Delta variant accounting for about 83% of the strains sequenced. This has been preceded by the Alpha variant, which peaked in March of this year (2021), and another less characterized variant (Janus), which peaked in September 2020. Each of these variants has become better adapted for infecting and spreading within the human population.
Presenter Bios
Dr. David Ussery has been working with bioinformatic analysis of bacterial genomes since the first sequence was published in 1995, and published one of the first text books in the field of Comparative Genomics. His team has published more than 200 papers, which have been cited more than 15,000 times, including two papers with more than a thousand citations. He has been a co-applicant on grants funded totaling more than $30 million, since 2010. His popular course on Comparative Genomics, taught at The Technical University of Denmark from 1997 -2015, is now taught in the Fall semesters at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS); one-week workshops based on this course have been held in North and South America, Europe, Asia, and Africa. Prof. Ussery has collaborative projects with groups in Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, The Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, and the UK, as well as in the U.S. Learn more about Dr. Ussery’s work here: https://armoneyandpolitics.com/unlocking-the-human-genome-dr-david-ussery-uams/