31st International Dynamics & Evolution of Human Viruses

Scientific Programme

Genomics & bioinformatics

• New sequencing technologies and methods, and their application to the analysis of virus genomes.
• Innovations and improvements to bioinformatic pipelines for processing virus sequence data.
• Environmental metagenomics, including wastewater sequencing.
• Note: new computational methods that could be incorporated into a pipeline may be more suitable for the Software track.

Zoonoses & emerging infections

• Using phylogenetic analysis to reconstruct host-switch events associated with the origin of novel human viruses.
• Estimating the time of origin for a virus species using molecular clock methods.
• Dynamics and evolution of emerging viruses.

Transmission dynamics & clusters

• Characterizing transmission risk factors: transmission cluster analysis, transmission pair studies.
• Genomic epidemiology, outbreak detection by tracking genetic clusters.
• Molecular source attribution.

Phylodynamics & phylogeography

• Reconstructing the evolving spatial distribution of virus populations over time (phylogeography)
• Phylodynamic and model-based estimation of transmission rates (basic/effective reproduction numbers) and related parameters.

Software, tools & methods

• Development and validation of new software for studying human viruses.
• Method comparison and benchmarking.
• Database / web application announcements.
• Advances in statistical and mathematical modeling methods.

Within-host dynamics & adaptation

• Viral dynamics in primary infection, transmission bottlenecks.
• Viral latency.
• Within-host genetic diversity, compartmentalization.
• Models of within-host viral and immune dynamics.
• Drug resistance and effects of therapy on virus populations.

Vaccines & immune escape

• Vaccine-driven virus evolution and predictive vaccine design.
• Dynamics of adaptive immunity.
• Antigenic and epitope evolution in viral proteins.