Biology seminars

Scientific computing has environmental impacts that extend beyond the growing use of artificial intelligence. This seminar examines how research computing affects the environment, how researchers can measure and reduce those effects, and how funders are responding. It also asks whether efficiency alone provides an adequate strategy. The speakers introduce Green DiSC, a certification scheme for sustainable computing, and the Environmentally Sustainable Computational Science community forum. The discussion connects practical choices in computational research with community approaches to sustainability and concludes with questions. It is suitable for researchers and software developers without prior knowledge of sustainable computing.

Parasites persist despite continual exposure to immune molecules and cells. African trypanosomes live in serum and tissues, while intracellular parasites such as malaria parasites display their own proteins on host cells. This seminar examines how parasites avoid detection and clearance through antigenic variation and surface proteins that suppress immune cells or their effectors. It also considers the experimental and computational approaches used to investigate these mechanisms, showing the diversity of adaptations that permit parasites to resist immunity. The presentation is intended for students and researchers interested in infection, immunity and evolution; undergraduate biology is helpful.

In situ cryo-electron tomography can reveal interactions between pathogens and their hosts inside intact cellular environments. This seminar uses apicomplexan parasites and gram-negative bacteria to explain the workflow from sample preparation through image acquisition and analysis. It covers freezing, cryo-focused ion beam milling, cryo-electron tomography, correlative light and electron microscopy, tomogram reconstruction, segmentation and subtomogram averaging. The presentation discusses which aspects of the host-pathogen interface these approaches can resolve, their advantages and limitations, and when they suit a research question. Familiarity with the organisms or cryo-electron microscopy is helpful but not required.

Infection research is identifying molecular targets involved in pathogen replication, metabolism and essential host functions, but translating discoveries into treatments requires functional validation. Advances in X-ray crystallography now permit larger-scale screening of fragments and other small molecules against these targets. This seminar presents technologies developed at EMBL Grenoble for fully automated fragment and ligand screening, and their use in investigating infection-related targets with therapeutic potential. It connects structural screening with small-molecule inhibitor development, target validation and evidence for therapeutic feasibility. The session is relevant to infection biology, chemical biology, structural biology and drug discovery.

This webinar explores computational and structure-based vaccine design, comparing prefusion stabilisation of vaccine antigens with epitope scaffolding onto non-antigen protein backbones. It discusses the advantages and limitations of both strategies. No background in computational protein design is required; familiarity with vaccine antigens and viral glycoproteins is helpful. Free online webinar; advance registration and details: https://www.ebi.ac.uk/training/events/strategies-computational-vaccine-design-prefusion-stabilisation-epitope-focussing/

Open biological data resources connect complementary evidence about proteins involved in infection. Using influenza haemagglutinin, this seminar demonstrates sequence and functional annotations in UniProt, three-dimensional cryo-EM maps in EMDB, and experimental and predicted structures in PDBe and the AlphaFold Protein Structure Database. Participants will learn to browse, retrieve and interpret these data and follow connections between the resources. The session also considers how accessible biological data supports infection research and pandemic preparedness. It is aimed at students and researchers in protein biology, structural biology and bioinformatics; basic knowledge of sequence and structure formats is useful.

Interpreting human missense variants requires connecting genomic coordinates with protein sequences, structures and functional evidence. ProtVar integrates annotations and predictions from UniProt, Ensembl, PDBe, Open Targets and AlphaFoldDB, extending variant lookup to discovery across more than 500 million potential missense variants. This seminar demonstrates natural-language searches using diseases, pathways and drug responses, multi-criteria filtering, structural visualisation and data export. Participants will learn to prioritise variants, interpret their structural and functional effects, and retrieve data through web downloads or the REST API. The session serves geneticists, drug-discovery researchers and computational biologists; undergraduate molecular biology and genetics are recommended.