Topic: mutations

Stephen Quake revisits the origins of genetic variation, connecting classic bacterial experiments with modern single-cell genomics. The lecture asks how mutations accumulate during human life, how they contribute to cancer and how tumour evolution can be reconstructed. It illustrates how measurements of individual cells help address these questions.

After more than 4 million deaths worldwide, the ongoing vaccination to conquer the COVID-19 disease is now competing with the emergence of increasingly contagious mutations, repeatedly supplanting earlier strains. Following the near-absence of historical examples of the long-time evolution of infectious diseases under similar circumstances, models are crucial to exemplify possible scenarios. Accordingly, in the present work we systematically generalize the popular susceptible-infected-recovered model to account for mutations leading to repeatedly occurring new strains, which we coarse grain ba