OxTalks is Changing
During Michaelmas Term, OxTalks will be moving to a new platform (full details are available on the Staff Gateway).
For now, continue using the current page and event submission process (freeze period dates to be advised).
If you have any questions, please contact halo@digital.ox.ac.uk
The trajectories of complex disease
Genomic data are increasingly being used to understand infectious disease epidemiology. Isolates from a given outbreak are sequenced, and the patterns of shared variation are used to infer phylogenetic trees. However these are not directly informative about who infected whom: a phylogenetic tree is not a transmission tree. A transmission tree can be inferred from a phylogeny while accounting for within-host genetic diversity by coloring the branches of a phylogeny according to which host those branches were in. We show how this approach can be applied to partially sampled and ongoing outbreaks. This requires computing the correct probability of a partially observed transmission tree and we demonstrate how to do this for a large class of epidemiological models. The resulting uncertainty on who infected whom can be high and we explore two solutions to this problem: the use of several genomes per host, and the use of additional epidemiological data.
Date:
6 February 2025, 16:00
Venue:
Seminar Room, Department of Earth Sciences
Speaker:
Professor Xavier Didelot (University of Warwick)
Organising department:
Department of Statistics
Organisers:
Beverley Lane (Department of Statistics, University of Oxford),
Professor Simon Myers (University of Oxford)
Organiser contact email address:
events@stats.ox.ac.uk
Hosts:
Professor Christl Donnelly (University of Oxford),
Professor Simon Myers (University of Oxford)
Part of:
Distinguished Speaker Seminar
Booking required?:
Required
Booking url:
https://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/events/distinguished-speaker-seminar-6th-february-2025
Booking email:
events@stats.ox.ac.uk
Cost:
No charge
Audience:
Members of the University only
Editor:
Beverley Lane
