Sunday 31 December 2017

New paper: Severe infections emerge from commensal bacteria by adaptive evolution

Published this month in eLife, our new paper on the evolution and adaptation of Staphylococcus aureus during infection.

This study shows that the emergence of life-threatening infections of the major pathogen Staphylococcus aureus from bacteria colonizing the nose is associated with repeatable adaptive evolution inside the human body.

First author Bernadette Young has summarized the paper's findings on the Modernising Medical Microbiology blog.


Monday 18 December 2017

SCOTTI wins PLoS Computational Biology Research Prize

Work from our group has been recognised in the PLoS Computational Biology 2017 Research Prizes. SCOTTI, which infers transmission routes from genetic and epidemiological information, won the Breakthrough in Advance/Innovation category. The citation reads
Our Breakthrough Advance/Innovation winning article presents a new computational tool, called SCOTTI (Structured COalescent Transmission Tree Inference), developed by Nicola De Maio of the University of Oxford (UK), and colleagues. De Maio says, “SCOTTI represents a convenient tool to reconstruct who-infected-whom within outbreaks… [and] has been used in particular for the study of bacterial hospital outbreaks”. It combines epidemiological information about patient exposure with genetic information about the infectious agent itself.
Work is nominated and selected as described in the announcement:
The journal invited the community to nominate their favorite 2016 published Research Articles. From these nominations the PLOS Computational Biology Research Prize Committee, made up of Editorial Board members Dina Schneidman, Nicola Segata, Maricel Kann, Isidore Rigoutsos, Avner Schlessinger, Lilia Iakoucheva, Ilya Ioshikhes, Shi-Jie Chen, and Becca Asquith, selected the winners. To help support future work, the authors of each winning paper will receive award certificates and a $2,000 (USD) prize.
You can read more about SCOTTI and the accompanying paper, written by Nicola De Maio, Jessie Wu and me, here.