Würzburg Life Science Seminar: Vivek Mutalik & Jay Hinton

Vivek Mutalik  - “Systematic phage-host interaction datasets for building predictive models of phage susceptibility”

The Mutalik lab focusses on the goal of understanding phage susceptibility, by building datasets that capture a natural genetic variation in bacterial strains and associated phages using scalable susceptibility assays and high throughput genetics to create a predictive model that connects bacterial genotype to phage susceptibility phenotype. During his talk entitled ‘Systematic phage-host interaction datasets for building predictive models of phage susceptibility’ Vivek Mutalik will present some of their recent efforts towards this goal at the Phage Foundry at Berkeley.

Prof  Jay Hinton - “How has Salmonella become so dangerous in Africa?”

The current focus in the Hinton lab is the lethal epidemic of bloodstream infections caused by non-typhoidal Salmonellain sub-Saharan Africa. Recent discoveries include the determination of the role of a single noncoding nucleotide in the over-expression of a key virulence factor in African Salmonella, an understanding of the step-wise evolution of African Salmonella, and the discovery of a novel lineage of S. Typhimurium ST313 in Malawi. During his talk entitled ‘How has Salmonella become so dangerous in Africa?’ Jay Hinton will talk about how they gained molecular insights into these evolutionary processes using a combination of molecular microbiology, genomics and functional transcriptomics.