LSH Seminar Jasmijn Baaijens

De novo approaches to viral quasispecies assembly

A virus infection usually consists of a group of closely related virus strains, together referred to as viral quasispecies. This diversity is the result of extremely high mutation rates, which allows a viral population to rapidly adapt to its environment and evolve resistance to antiviral drugs. It is therefore of great importance to identify each of the individual genomes (haplotypes). However, this is a challenging task because of sequencing errors and low strain abundance rates, especially in the absence of high-quality reference sequences. In this talk, I will present an overview of the methods I've developed during my PhD research for de novo viral quasispecies assembly. And as this will be my last time presenting in the LSH seminar, there will be cake afterwards!