Redefining Virus Evolution and Emergence Using Metatranscriptomics
The Ernst A. H. Friedheim Memorial Lecture
Event Details
- Type
- Friday Lecture Series
- Speaker(s)
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Edward Holmes, Ph.D., FAA, NHMRC Leadership Fellow, professor of virology, The University of Sydney
- Speaker bio(s)
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Metatranscriptomics has transformed our understanding of the virosphere, enabling the viruses within any sample to be identified, and revealing how viruses move across the human-animal interface. Dr. Edward Holmes will show how metatranscriptomics, combined with advances in artificial intelligence (AI) that can integrate primary sequence and structural information to identify viral sequences, is providing new insights into fundamental aspects of virus diversity, evolution, and emergence, extending the evolutionary histories of major virus families. He will also show how AI-based methods have led to the discovery of tens of thousands of RNA viruses, revealing that viral genomes are often evolutionary composites, and redefining our knowledge of the scale and composition of the virosphere.
Edward (Eddie) Holmes is an NHMRC Leadership Fellow and Professor of Virology at University of Sydney, Australia, which he joined in 2012. Eddie received his undergraduate degree from the University of London (1986) and his Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge (1990). Between 1993-2004 he held various positions at the University of Oxford, including University Lecturer in Evolutionary Biology and Fellow of New College. He was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science in 2015 and of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2017. In 2021 he received the Australian Prime Minister’s Prize for Science, and was awarded the 2024 Croonian Medal and Lecture by The Royal Society.
- Open to
- Tri-Institutional