Lecture: Viromes: from insects to infants
Projekty — 01.02.2021

MICOBION

Lecture: Viromes: from insects to infants

Prof. Jelle Matthijnssens, Principal Investigator, Laboratory of Viral Metagenomics, KU Leuven, Belgium

Abstract

The increasing adoption of high throughput sequencing technology has revolutionized many research fields, including the field of viral metagenomics. Even though many challenges remain with respect to the purification of viral like particles (VLPs) from biological samples, processing samples to be sequenced and their subsequent bio-informatics analyses, we are starting to get a glimpse of the incredible virus world we live in. In this presentation I will first describe our latest findings about the virome present in mosquitoes, as well as the presence of a potential “core virome”, which could have modulatory effects on the vector competence of mosquitoes for important arboviruses. As a second project I will describe the virome diversity in Belgian honeybees and how these are associated with the loss of colonies over winter (winter loss), which is a big problem in many European countries. Finally, I will describe the virus colonization process (both eukaryotic viruses as well as bacteriophages) in the gut of health newborn Belgian infants during the first year of life, and how this is affected by external factors.

Lecture Recording

 

Aktuality