A, C, T, ID: Using Genome Sequencing As a Tool to Understand Outbreaks of Infectious Disease

Ever since John Snow traced the origins of an 1854 cholera outbreak to a specific water pump in London, epidemiologists have used a range of techniques to understand the origins and spread of infectious disease outbreaks. The current approach to investigating most outbreaks involves a combination of field epidemiology and basic molecular epidemiology - phenotyping or genotyping methods that determine whether two isolates of a particular organism are related. Despite our best efforts, though, many outbreaks are difficult to unravel using existing molecular epidemiology techniques. The introduction of next-generation DNA sequencing platforms is promising to change this, however. It is now simple and cost-effective to sequence all of the isolates from a given outbreak, and relatively straightforward to use the microevolutionary data present within these genomes to reconstruct the path an outbreak organism took through a community. In this talk, Dr. Gardy will introduce some of the first studies in this emerging field of "genomic epidemiology" and present in greater detail the results of a recent study her group undertook to reconstruct an outbreak of tuberculosis.

Speaker: Dr. Jennifer Gardy, University of British Columbia

Room: T-175