Pandemic preparedness: assessing spill-over risk of RNA viruses

About this project

A major goal of our Helmholtz-funded project in the CoViPa consortium is to help increasing pandemic preparedness by means of computational high-throughput virus discovery and evolutionary analyses to identify both RNA viruses with high risk of spillover into the human population and potential animal host reservoirs. We utilize >149,000 RNA virus sequences discovered from our SRA screen of >500,000 eukaryotic transcriptome projects to study virus-host co-evolution and to identify viruses with broad host ranges that we hypothesize to having the highest likelihood for spillover. Moreover, we apply computational approaches to advance the functional characterization of the proteome of corona- and other nidoviruses in order to identify possible unknown pathogenicity factors of these viruses. In the mid-term, we plan to experimentally characterize potentially novel viral pathogenicity factors predicted by the bioinformatics analysis via expressing testing and functional phenotyping. to uncover for instance inhibitors of interferone signaling in collaboration with other RESIST and CoViPa members.

Funding

KA1-Co-02 CoViPa