Hi!
I'm
Spyros

An evolutionary virologist at the Systems Virology lab of the University of Tokyo. I study the arms race evolution between viruses and host immune responses and how this process can explain when viruses spill over into new species.

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About me

I primarily use computational approaches to study how viruses evolve in relation to their hosts' immune responses. My current work and research interests include:

  • The evolutionary origins of SARS-CoV-2
  • Arms race evolution between coronaviruses and their bat hosts
  • Determinants of dinucleotide biases in virus genomes
  • The evolutionary history of antiviral interferon-stimulated genes (ISGs)
  • Endogenous viral elements (EVEs) and paleovirology

Publications

Public Engagement

Exploring the molecular interplay between viruses and their reservoir hosts' immune systems can aid our understanding of how these viruses can potentially spill over into new hosts. Have a watch of the clip below where I explain our work on resurrecting an ancient bat defence against SARS-related coronaviruses



Understanding the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic will help us to stop coronavirus pandemics from happening in the future. Have a watch of my short interview and our animated video explaining how we study the evolutionary history and likely origins of SARS-CoV-2 and its relative coronaviruses.

Conference Talks

Software

The DinuQ (Dinucleotide Quantification) Python3 package provides a range of metrics for quantifying nucleotide, dinucleotide representation and synonymous codon usage in a DNA/RNA sequence. These include the recently developed corrected Synonymous Dinucleotide Usage (SDUc) and corrected Relative Synonymous Dinucleotide Usage (RSDUc).



DinuQ
Want to chat science / start a project together? Get in touch!
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