The Changing Face of the COVID-19 Virus – A Genomic and AI-enabled Exploration
Innovation Grand Rounds (IGR) with Gustavo Caetano-Anollés, PhD
Friday, November 10, 2023
12-12:45 p.m. Presentation by Gustavo Caetano-Anollés, PhD
12:45-1 p.m. Questions & Dialogue
Register here to lunch in person with colleagues at MSB Lecture Hall (Room 274) *
(*Registration closes at noon on Monday, November 6)
Or attend virtually via Zoom call-in
Predictive intelligence is a forward-looking strategy that uses past events to anticipate the future. In this talk, Health Innovation Professor Gustavo Caetano-Anollés will report on the efforts to generate predictive intelligence for viral pandemics. He will focus on the changing face of the evolving COVID-19 virus, which continues to represent a worldwide threat despite implementation of public-wide vaccination measures. Professor Caetano-Anollés will present a study of millions of genome sequences of the virus that revealed how viral genetic makeup is being structured by emerging mutant constellations. He will report the existence of haplotypes – sets of mutations that are inherited together – linked to virus seasonality that coalesced into constellations delimiting networks of molecular interactions. His laboratory modeled the changing structure of the 30 proteins that are encoded in the genome of the virus with powerful deep-learning ab initio structural prediction methods, revealing a central functional role of protein loop and structural domain regions. The goal is to develop artificial intelligence and machine-learning tools that can be used for drug repurposing/design and emergency health security programs.
Gustavo Caetano-Anollés is a recently appointed Health Innovation Professor at Carle Illinois College of Medicine, a professor of Bioinformatics and University Scholar at the Department of Crop Sciences, and an affiliate at the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In addition to his COVID-19 research, he leverages interdisciplinary efforts to expand the frontiers of bioinformatics, exploring how molecular structure determines biological function in higher organisms and microbes of significance. One focus is the origin, structure, and evolution of genomes, proteomes, RNomes, and functionomes for applications in bioengineering, biomedicine, and systems biology.