This week, some Technical Adaptations for best viewing;Viruses as Unique & Long-lived as Their Human Hosts

Description:  Much of the “Invisible Biology” of the world around us consists of viruses, which are as diverse and varied in their lifestyles as the other organisms we see around us. Herpesviruses are a particularly widespread family of viruses. Unlike acute infections that we clear in days or weeks, these viruses are resident within us for an entire lifetime — always capable of re-emerging and spreading to new hosts. This talk will highlight the unique biology of herpes simplex viruses, which infect humans and set up a lifelong infection in our nervous system. I’ll explain how the revolution of next-generation or “deep” sequencing has revealed far more diversity and flexibility in these viruses than we thought possible. We’ll also explore how changes in human behavior are in turn re-shaping these viruses.

Bio:  Moriah Szpara is an Associate Professor in the Departments of Biology, and of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, at the Pennsylvania State University. Her group is part of the Center for Infectious Disease Dynamics (CIDD) at Penn State, within the Huck Institutes for the Life Sciences. Szpara received her Ph.D. in Molecular and Cell Biology from the University of California Berkeley, in neurobiology. As a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University with Dr. Lynn Enquist, Dr. Szpara focused on the neurotropic herpesviruses. The Szpara lab now explores the impacts of viral genetic diversity on virulence and disease severity, with a focus on viruses that infect the nervous system. Our research spans the range from genomic and bioinformatic comparisons of viral genomes, to dissecting viral interactions with human neurons, to examining viral diversity in real-world human infections. We also build open-source tools for working with viral genomes, like VirAmp (http://viramp.com) and VirGA (http:// virga.readthedocs.org/). You can keep up with the lab’s research at: http://szparalab.psu.edu/, or on Science Twitter @SzparaLab. 

Websites:  Here is the Szpara Lab’s website, to see our past papers & related resources:  http://szparalab.psu.edu/
ViralZone is a wonderful resource to look up details of any virus: https://viralzone.expasy.org/
This Week in Virology (TWiV) is a fabulous podcast & blog by a group of fellow virologists: https://www.microbe.tv/twiv/

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On February 15 we’ll have a special Monday edition of Wednesday Nite @ The Lab as Sean B. Carroll of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute returns for a screening of his documentary The Serengeti Rules as part of UW-Madison’s Darwin Day celebrations.

On February 17 we will welcome a panel of researchers who will be discussing “The Co-evolution of Mammals and Microbes”:

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Hope to see you soon at Wednesday Nite @ The Lab!