Institute´s Seminar - Christel Kamp: Multiscale modelling in bio-medical research: from human epidemiology to phage biology

  • Date: Mar 21, 2019
  • Time: 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Location: MPI Plön
  • Room: Lecture hall
  • Host: Chaitanya Gokhale

Abstract

The section Biostatistics complements bio-medical research at the Paul-Ehrlich-Institut with cross-sectional expertise in mathematical modelling which includes standard bioinformatics and statistical approaches as well as original research and model development.

Our research aims at a better understanding of host-pathogen interactions at different scales: On the population scale, the emergence and spread of infectious agents along transmission networks has been studied taking the variability in numbers and intensities among contacts into account. We have further shown how epidemiology based modelling can support public health by informing about the availability and safety of scarce resources such as blood components.

On the host level, biases in codon usage seen in a pathogen’s genes can inform about its biological and clinical characteristics. Motivated from findings in human papillomaviruses (HPV), we have further studied the relevance of codon bias in the context of biotechnological applications such as the optimization of heterologously expressed genes. Finally, our recent research has been focused on the population dynamics and ecology of bacteria and the phages infecting them, i.e. epidemiology at the level of bacteria. A brief overview is given of the insights gained in these fields through mathematical modelling with particular emphasis on open questions in phage biology.

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