Behind the Paper

The real stories behind the latest research papers, from conception to publication, the highs and the lows

How can AI modernize Veterinary Care?

When innovations are rapidly sweeping across all fields of human society, we want to leverage them to improve every aspect of our life and the lives around us --- the companion animals. Veterinary records can be extremely valuable for research and public health --- 60-70% of all emerging diagnoses are transmitted from animals to humans. Beyond that, companion animals have been increasingly used to study naturally occurring diseases as they share similar environments to humans and are often representative disease models to recapitulate diseases in humans.
Go to the profile of Allen Nie
May 08, 2019

The quest to organize the prokaryotic virosphere

A rigorous classification system is foundational for biology. However, viruses offer particularly problematic classification challenges. This is because in any gram of soil or milliliter of seawater there can be many millions to billions of viruses. We can only recently “see” them (using molecular methods) and they are all busy exchanging genes between each other and with their hosts in ways that paradigms suggest should undermine any genome-based taxonomy. However, we wanted to ask the question of whether simply looking at shared genes between viruses using networks could get us on the right track towards organizing the mostly unknown and unmapped viral sequence space.
Go to the profile of Olivier Zablocki
May 06, 2019