Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Fall 2014 Seminar Series
Seminar Title: Manipulating and predicting viral evolution
Time: 3:00-4:00 PM, Friday, Sep 12, 2014
Location: ECE 101 Lankford Lab
Speaker:
Claus Wilke
University of Texas at Austin
Abstract:
Viruses are among the most rapidly evolving organisms. They frequently adapt to new hosts
(leading to emerging diseases), they evolve resistance to treatments or immune response, and they
can recover quickly when attenuated with deleterious but not lethal mutations. In this talk, I will
discuss several computational approaches to predict how viruses may evolve, to manipulate them
such that their adaptive potential is limited, and to identify important sites in viral proteins. I will
specifically talk about host-range shifts in New-World arena viruses, about designing attenuated
viruses by codon-deoptimization, and about the relationship between protein structure and sequence
evolution in influenza virus.
Speaker Bio:
Claus Wilke received his PhD in Theoretical Physics from the University of Bochum in Germany in
1999. He was a postdoc in the Adami lab at Caltech from 2000 to 2005, where he received
postdoctoral training in biological physics, evolutionary biology, and artificial life. Since 2005, he
has been a faculty member in Integrative Biology at The University of Texas at Austin, where he
currently holds the title of Professor. Claus Wilke has authored or co-authored of over 100 scientific
publications covering topics in computational biology, evolutionary biology, bioinformatics,
population genetics, and statistics.