Advances in Immunology and Microbiology Seminar Series
About the event
Featuring research in the areas of:
Epidemiology | Infectious Disease | Disease Ecology | Drug Discovery | Virology |
Global Health | Vector-Borne Disease | Pathology
The Advances in Immunology & Microbiology seminar series is a weekly forum that brings together scientists from diverse fields and disciplines across the College of Veterinary Medicine to discuss research advances in the broad areas of immunology, microbiology, infectious diseases, and global health. Seminars feature student speakers from the Immunology & Infectious Disease (IID) doctoral program, IID-affiliated postdoctoral researchers and faculty, intramural speakers from across the university, and extramural speakers.
PRESENTER: Ricard Rivero, PhD Candidate, Allen School for Global Health, Washington State University (Advisor: Dr. Stephanie Seifert)
TITLE: The molecular and ecological determinants of effective reassortment in Hantaviruses
Viruses with segmented genomes can swap whole gene segments when two strains infect the same host, a process called reassortment. In hantaviruses, reassortment can generate new genetic combinations, but it remains unclear why some of these combinations persist while most do not. In this talk, I examine reassortment in the broader context of hantavirus evolution, beginning with the long-standing paradigm that many hantaviruses track the evolutionary history of their rodent hosts. I then show how evolutionary trees and statistical models reveal important departures from that pattern and ask what predicts successful, or effective, reassortment. Across this work, two forces repeatedly emerge: ecological opportunity, which determines when viruses can meet, and molecular compatibility, which determines whether exchanged genome segments can function together. These results suggest that reassortment is not random, but shaped by both host ecology and viral genetics, with implications for how new viral variants emerge and persist.