News

University of Pittsburgh researchers are studying tiny…

Suggesting the coronavirus is less lethal now than it was two months ago would be a mistake…

CEBaM Member, Fadi Lakkis, along with Martin Oberbarnscheidt, Xian Li (Houston Methodist Research Institute), investigators at the Starzl Transplant Institute and the Department of Immunology at the University of Pittsburgh, publish a manuscript in Science on innate immune memory in transplantation. 

The Ambrose lab received one of the 17 pilot grants awarded by the University of Pittsburgh Clinical and Translational Science Institute (CTSI) on basic SARS-CoV-2 research. SARS-CoV-2 is the coronavirus that causes COVID-19. The project will study how the virus replicates in cells, including live-cell imaging. Understanding how SARS-CoV-2 infects different cell types will help development of COVID-19 therapeutics.

Event Date (Pacific Time): May 16, 2020 -1:00pm to 5:00pm Event Summary:As the COVID-19 pandemic illustrates, infectious diseases can have profound influences on their host populations. Human evolution has unquestionably been shaped by past infections. However, humans have also shaped pathogen dynamics and virulence via a multitude of factors. Some ancient human influences range from changes in social organization, group size, and the exploitation of more varied ecosystems. More recently, developments such as settlement, agriculture, technology, rapid long-distance travel, medicine, and global economic…

Ongoing evolution of the #COVID19 virus Is the #COVID19 virus evolving? How many strains are there? What do the mutations mean? Should I worry (no!)? What can we learn from this? Will we be able to design drugs against them? 11 minute video lecture here: The ongoing evolution of #SARSCoV2

An Educational Video By Dr. Vaughn Cooper Where did #COVID19 come from? Where’s it going? This video discusses: source of SARS-CoV-2, relatedness to other CoV, how it’s currently evolving but likely not affecting function, and value for epidemiology.

GENETICS-BASED DIGITAL DATING: SCIENCE BEHIND GENETIC MATCHMAKING Author: Stefan Andjelkovic This article originally appeared as a student blog post from the Evolutionary Biology of Human Disease class. At the turn of the millennium, completion of the Human Genome Project opened up a multiverse of possibilities for further research and understanding of what makes humans tick. This 13-years long, $3-billion odyssey of reading a complete human genome for the first time, put its foot in the door to bring whole genome…

The Pittsburgh Center for Evolutionary Biology and Medicine (CEBaM) is pleased to announce its Catalyst Award Program. The Mission of the Center is to advance the fields of evolutionary biology and medicine by catalyzing research at their interface. The Center serves to cultivate educational and scientific collaborations between evolutionary biologists and biomedical researchers. In 2020, we will award 2 (or more) fellowships of up to $10,000 to trainees (Ph.D. students or postdoctoral researchers) to support a new or existing project…

Evolution is a fundamental unifying principle of biology. This class takes a broad approach to illustrate…