ANALYSIS OF SPECIATION MECHANISMS IN RNA VIRUSES

Objective

Parasites have high socio-economic impact due to their negative effect on humans, animals and plants welfare. Parasite evolution may lead to emergence of new infectious diseases, and compromise existing disease control strategies. Viruses are one of the most important groups of parasites causing a large fraction of emerging diseases. Adaptation to new environments may lead to population diversification, including “speciation” events resulting in the appearance of new viruses. Ecological and genetic factors are important in determining virus evolution. Environmental modifications impose selection pressures, thus changes in host population density or distribution will result in the appearance of new viral strains or species. Mutation and recombination are the main mechanisms for generating genetic variability in RNA viruses: their high mutation rates allow them to evolve rapidly adapting to new environments. Exchange of gene modules between related viral strains (modular evolution) may also result in new variants with higher fitness. We will analyze the role of these evolutionary mechanisms in the processes of virus speciation using bioinformatic tools applied to genomic sequence datasets. Analyses will focus on the families Picornaviridae, Coronaviridae and Potyviridae as models for RNA virus evolution. The three families have been widely studied, as they are important human, domestic animals and wildlife, and crop pathogens, with high sociological and agronomic relevance. Sequence data, together with information on host range and geographical distribution, are available for a large number of species and strains of these families. However, despite this data availability, to date there has been no extensive analysis of the patterns and processes of RNA virus speciation. Understanding virus evolution may be of deep interest as it may help to predict and control viral epidemics, and to understand the processes leading to the emergence of new infectious diseases.

Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)

CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.

• medical and health sciences health sciences infectious diseases RNA viruses
• natural sciences biological sciences microbiology virology
• natural sciences biological sciences genetics mutation virus mutation
• social sciences economics and business economics health economics economic impact of epidemics

Keywords

Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)

• Computational biology
• Evolutionary biology
• Natural sciences
• RNA viruses
• Speciation
• modular evolution

Programme(s)

Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.

• FP7-PEOPLE - Specific programme "People" implementing the Seventh Framework Programme of the European Community for research, technological development and demonstration activities (2007 to 2013)

Topic(s)

Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.

• FP7-PEOPLE-IOF-2008 - Marie Curie Action: "International Outgoing Fellowships for Career Development"

Call for proposal

Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.

FP7-PEOPLE-IOF-2008
See other projects for this call

Funding Scheme

Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.

MC-IOF - International Outgoing Fellowships (IOF)

Coordinator