| Speaker: Julia Gog Affiliation: University of Cambridge Time: 11am Wednesday, 27 April, 2016 Location: 303S-561 |
| Influenza is a segmented virus. We know this complicates virion particle assembly as they must contain each of the eight segments. This means that each of the RNA segments must contain some signal, and that this signal ought to be fairly conserved. Is this enough to go and hunt them down using mathematics? The answer turns out to be yes. However, this required some creativity in algorithm design, drawing inspiration from a number of apparently unrelated problems. The net result could be described as a bit “Heath Robinson”, but it seems to work… |