Project Title: "Understanding the Unexpectedly High Mutation Rate and Rapid Evolution of Small DNA Viruses"
This project is awarded under the Postdoctoral Research Fellowships in Biological Informatics Program for 2006. The Fellow will uses computational analyses to estimate the substitution rate, study the mutational bias and determine the evolutionary dynamics of small DNA viruses. The project has two aims: (1) determine whether the unexpectedly high mutation rates and intra-host diversity of single-stranded DNA viruses are due to chemical degradation of certain bases of DNA, such as unpaired cytosines, which would result in a high, but biased, substitution rate; and (2) determine the first independent measure of the substitution rate of human papillomaviruses, a small double-stranded DNA pathogen which is thought to have co-diverged with humans during ancient migrations.
The research will be carried out in the lab of Edward Holmes at Pennsylvania State University. Training will focus on cutting-edge bioinformatic techniques, and how to study virus evolution through deep evolutionary time. This knowledge, combined with my expertise in experimental evolution, will enable an independent research program integrating in vivo and in silico approaches to virus evolution at a research-oriented university
