Advances in genomic technologies and their applications to detect and characterize infectious diseases of significance to public health provide great opportunities to improve surveillance and response efforts. Key challenges to the expansion of advanced molecular detection methods within public health laboratories and health departments include workforce training; development of standardized protocols for wet lab and bioinformatics; and data infrastructure to store, merge, analyze, and protect patient-linked sequencing data.
The Department of General Services (DGS) Division of Consolidated Laboratory Services (DCLS) and partners at the Virginia Department of Health (VDH), University of Virginia (UVA) School of Medicine (SOM) and Biocomplexity Institute (BI), and Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) are working together as the Virginia Pathogen Genomics Center of Excellence (VA PGCoE) to further advance the utilization of genomic technologies in public health.
Current Activities and Development
“Phylogeny for Pathogen Identification” Webinar at VDH Genomic Epi Seminar Series
September 22, 2023
What is a phylogenetic tree? What is it based on? How can you generate it? And what do those odd-looking things mean? These, and many more questions, are addressed in this webinar.
Pathogen Murder Mystery Series
This video series demonstrates an example of identifying a pathogen during an outbreak. We will explore the identification of an isolate from the 2011 European outbreak of Escherichia coli in our analysis, demonstrating how to identify the organism and its serotype from reads and contigs. We will also step through assembly and annotation, and then do a deeper dive on phylogenetic trees and their interpretation.
