How a bioinformatician and a computational biologist study the same outbreak (Video)
Written guide: Genomic Epidemiology: Integrating Pathogen Genomics into Outbreak Investigations
Full video: Bioinformatics versus Computational Biology
In a hospital outbreak, a bioinformatician compares virus genomes to find shared sources, and a computational biologist models how the infection will spread.
Chapters
- 0:00 How a bioinformatician and a computational biologist study the same outbreak
Video transcript
0:00 How a bioinformatician and a computational biologist study the same outbreak
During an outbreak, a hospital laboratory sequences the virus genome from each infected patient. A bioinformatician aligns those sequences to a reference genome and compares the genomes with one another. The differences between the genomes place the patients on a phylogenetic tree and the tree shows which infections likely share a source. A computational biologist uses the same outbreak to build a mathematical model. Equations describe how people move from susceptible to infected to recovered and the model predicts how many new cases the hospital will see next week. In this outbreak, the bioinformatician works with the sequence data and the software that analyzes those sequences and the computational biologist writes equations that predict how the infection will spread.