Archive for August, 2015

Virology Africa 2015: Update and Registration

19 August, 2015

REGISTRATION IS NOW OPEN – VIROLOGY AFRICA 2015

On behalf of the Institute of Infectious Disease and Molecular Medicine of the University of Cape Town and the Poliomyelitis Research Foundation, we are pleased to invite you to Virology Africa 2015 at the Cape Town Waterfront.

VENUE AND DATES:

The conference will run from Tuesday 1st – Thursday 3rd December 2015. The conference venue is the Radisson Blu Hotel with a magnificent view of the ocean. The hotel school next door will host the cocktail party on the Monday night 30th November and in keeping with Virology Africa tradition, the dinner venue is the Two Oceans Aquarium.

IMPORTANT DATES

Early Bird Registration closes – 30 September 2015
Abstract Submissions deadline – 30 September 2015

The ACADEMIC PROGRAMME will include plenary-type presentations from internationally recognised speakers. We wish to emphasise that this is intended as a general virology conference – which means we will welcome plant, human, animal and bacterial virology contributions. The venue will allow for parallel workshops of oral presentations. There will also be poster sessions. Senior students will be encouraged to present their research. We have sponsorship for students to attend the meeting and details will be announced later in the year.

A program outline has been added to the website

WORKSHOPS

Our preliminary programme includes two workshops.

There is a hands-on workshop on “Plant cell packs for transient expression: Innovating the field of molecular biopharming”, with the contact person being Dr Inga Hitzeroth – Inga.Hitzeroth@uct.ac.za. This workshop will run at UCT one day before the conference, 30th November, and a second day, 4th December, after the conference.

The second workshop is on “”Viromics for virus discovery and viral community analysis”. The workshop at UCT will be on 4 and 5 December with the contact person being Dr Tracy Meiring – tracy.meiring@uct.ac.za.

Some of the workshop presenters will be integrated into the conference programme but the practical components will be run at University of Cape Town. Separate applications are necessary for each workshop.

If you are prepared to fund an internationally recognised scientist to speak at the conference or if you wish to organise a specialist workshop as part of the conference, please contact
Anna-Lise Williamson or Ed Rybicki.

For any enquiries please contact
Miss Bridget Petersen/ Email: conference1@onscreenav.co.za or phone: +27 21 486 9111
Ms Deborah McTeer/Email: conference@onscreenav.co.za or +27 83 457 1975

Tags:, , , ,
Posted in biofarming, biotechnology, Ebola, Ebola, Evolution, geminivirus, General, General Virology, history, HIV, HPV, Influenza viruses, Marine Viruses, phages, plant viruses, Teaching, techniques, Vaccines: General, Viruses | 1 Comment »

Laurie Garrett on Ebola: the recent history

18 August, 2015

20 years after I first posted something by Laurie Garrett – who has written two of the the most thought-provoking, informative and frightening books I have ever read (The Coming Plague, and Betrayal of Trust) – I see she has just published possibly the single best account of the recent Ebola virus disease outbreak in West Africa.

Seriously.  Exhaustive, deep, analytical – and like her books, throwing some harsh light on world health care systems (or the lack thereof, in the case of the WHO), while at the same time making useful suggestions.

Like this one:

“And so it comes back to money. The world will get what it pays for—and right now, that is not very much.”

Absolutely: consider that the late and haphazard and meagre response by most governments let the epidemic peak and then start to subside – without actually, in the case of the US, managing to get more than one treatment centre functional in Liberia, before they ran out of patients.  That the health systems of all three countries are in such bad shape that they can’t deal with childbirth and malaria right now.

Laurie, it’s a great piece, really it is. It’s also depressing as hell.  But that’s life!

Tags:, , ,
Posted in biotechnology, Ebola, Ebola, Evolution, General Virology, history, Teaching, Vaccines: General, Viruses | Leave a Comment »

How should we preserve old viruses?

12 August, 2015

I was reminded via Twitter by Vincent Racaniello, he of “virology blog” fame, of the problem of preserving stocks of old viruses.

Particularly, in his case, of stocks of a virus that may be eradicated in the wild in a few years, and then – according to him – will need to be destroyed.

Surely we need to at least preserve sequence information of these pathogens before we let them go into oblivion, the way variola and rinderpest viruses have already gone?

So I wrote this to him:

“Great that you have preserved these samples – but a longer-term strategy needs to be adopted, before completely irreplaceable specimens are lost forever, to you and to science in general.

tmv sedimI have the same problem: a colleagues’ samples of plant viruses; beautifully preserved in heat-sealed glass vials, dried over silica gel, dating back in some cases to the early 1960s. For that matter, I have about a thousand glass bottles of liquid plant virus samples at 4degC, dating back in some cases over 40 years – and still viable.

Surely there is a case to be made for preserving some of these viruses? Mining them for sequence in this metagenomic age is not that difficult; preserving their infectivity, however – another matter. Some of my plant viruses are probably bomb-proof; your poliovirus samples, on the other hand – probably slowly deteriorating as we watch.

A wider conversation is needed: I know of other archives, of old poxvirus collections for example, that will be lost forever in a few years. Should we not get an international effort going to log them, sequence them, preserve them?

I think so.

Want to join in?

Yours,

Ed”

If any of you out there have a similar problem, let’s hear from you – and maybe we can do something to at least preserve the genetic information in unique collections.

Tags:
Posted in biotechnology, Evolution, General, General Virology, history, phages, Teaching, Vaccines: General, Viruses | Leave a Comment »

Gone, but not quite forgotten: the Rybicki teaching pages

6 August, 2015

I have extolled the virtues of the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine previously, as a magic means of finding material that you probably thought (and sometimes wished) was long lost: in that instance it was my old Ebola news pages.

I now find a new reason to commend its virtues to the skies: I once wrote, on The Guru Cann’s site,

“So how does one even approach the problem of constructing a history of any particular corpus of web-published material?”

The Wayback Machine, it appears is an answer.  Not THE answer, because there are still holes in its coverage, but here is an example of how many iterations there are of archives of my Web-based PCR Methods teaching pages:

Banners_and_Alerts_and_PCR

Right back to 2004!  The teaching material goes back to 1997, along with my primitive efforts at a Departmental Web page – like the old Department of Microbiology, all my pages are now defunct

Internet_Archive_Wayback_Machine– because our University, in their wisdom, has now decided to switch to Drupal-based web sites, meaning all my old material along with the servers it’s on, is dead.

Defunct.  Deceased.  No longer with us.  Except…

I find, to my joy, that you CAN in fact get to nearly all of it, and backed up as recently as March 2014, via this link:

MCB_-_Online_teaching_material

Might not be completely back from the dead, but it’s a reasonable facsimile – and it means that if anyone was using it, they can continue to do so – while I sort out new versions, and new addresses.

And, of course, finish my book based on it…B-)

Till then!

Tags:, , , ,
Posted in General Virology, history, Teaching | 2 Comments »