Abstract

Influenza has a genome split into several segments, and this complicates virus particle assembly as each particle must have one of each of the segments. This means that each of the RNA segments must contain some signal, and that this signal ought to be fairly conserved. Is this enough to go and hunt them down using mathematics? The answer turns out to be yes. However, this required some creativity in algorithm design, drawing inspiration from a number of apparently unrelated problems. This hack seems to work, but leaves some interesting mathematical problems.

I’ll also briefly talk about some of the other problems in influenza and infectious disease that interest me, and general joys and challenges of being a mathematician trying to research biology.

As usual there will be free port and juice served before the talk at 8:15PM. This talk is for members only, but there will be a chance to sign up for TMS life membership for £2.50.