Lambodhar Damodaran

Development of avian influenza A(H5) virus datasets for Nextclade enables rapid and accurate clade assignment Abstract. The 2022 panzootic of highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) A(H5) viruses has led to unprecedented transmission to multiple mammalian species.

Our lab's first paper is out! Led by Jordan Ort, we developed NextClade datasets that enable rapid H5 clade assignment via NextClade. We deployed these during the start of the H5 cattle outbreak, and we finally published the paper in Virus Evolution academic.oup.com/ve/article/1...

Check out this cool preprint on Dengue epidemiology in Colombia! It was a pleasure to work with Ricardo on some of these interesting phylodynamic analyses!

Emergence and interstate spread of highly pathogenic avian influenza A(H5N1) in dairy cattle in the United States Highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) viruses cross species barriers and have the potential to cause pandemics. In North America, HPAI A(H5N1) viruses related to the goose/Guangdong 2.3.4.4b hemagg...

Important work from Tavis Anderson and our Penn-CEIRR USDA colleagues:
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

U.S. citizen interested in grad studies at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver (Canada)?

Grad programs are re-opening applications of US programs for one week. With expedited decisions.

U.S. Applicant Week:

www.grad.ubc.ca/us-applicant...

#AcademicChatter #Canada #GradSchool

A tricky thing about modern society is that no one has any idea when they don’t die.

Like, the number of lives saved by controlling air pollution in America is probably over 200,000 per year, but the number of people who think their life was saved by controlling air pollution is zero.

Please watch. Powerful and chilling. 1: ‘Do not obey in advance.’ 20: ‘Be as courageous as you can!’

Lengthy delays in H5N1 genome submissions to GISAID Nature Biotechnology - Lengthy delays in H5N1 genome submissions to GISAID

1/3 How long do you think it takes for highly pathogenic avian flu H5N1 sequences to be uploaded to GISAID after collection? How long should it be? In this commentary, we find a median delay of 228 days, with half the countries taking more than 6 months. rdcu.be/eeZGU @naturebiotech.bsky.social

I'm hopping on the market for postdocs outside the US...
...as soon as I finish some new analyses for a manuscript.

Lmk if there are any good leads! I've been collecting random ones here and there, but it's more daunting now that my home country appears to be off the table.

High-throughput neutralization measurements correlate strongly with evolutionary success of human influenza strains Human influenza viruses rapidly acquire mutations in their hemagglutinin (HA) protein that erode neutralization by antibodies from prior exposures. Here, we use a sequencing-based assay to measure neu...

In study led by @ckikawa.bsky.social & Andrea Loes, we use new assay to measure ~10,000 neutralization titers to recent influenza strains & show titers correlate w evolutionary success of viral strains

Similar data could help forecast evolution for vaccine selection

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Postdoc Opportunity

Got a PhD in disease evolution, or something similarly hardcore? Know your way around phylodynamics? Good. We need you.

If you’re up for real-world research getting hands-on with fieldwork, sequencing, and making sense of viral evolution, apply here: jobs.inrae.fr/en/ot-25456.

Immune history shapes human antibody responses to H5N1 influenza viruses - Nature Medicine H5N1 strain-specific antibodies are higher in older individuals and correlate more with birth year than with age, suggesting that younger individuals are potentially more likely to benefit from H5N1 v...

Today @natmedicine.bsky.social published our study showing the older individuals born prior to 1968 have more antibodies that cross-react to #H5N1 relative to younger individuals. If H5N1 causes a pandemic, children will likely be the most susceptible. 1/2

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Highly suggest folks read up about Lysenkosism because it feels like that is where we are heading.

Check out some really cool work on canine influenza that was just published! Awesome collaborative team and looking forward to learning more about this very understudied pathogen!

Figure 2. Visualizing a knowledge graph ontology. (a) Representing subject–predicate–object (SPO) triples in a graph format. (b) The current data ecosystem; each dotted box represents a type of tabular dataset that may contain many of the individual SPO triples. (c) A domain-specific ontology to represent an outbreak. Nodes (circles) represent instances of a class, with the bolded text above or below as labels with the node classes. To the left or right of each node are the properties of that node. (d) The full ontology and schema for the zoonotic risk knowledge graph. The graph schema adheres to the ontology.

Timely work on data integration for flu spillover prediction from @haileyrobertson.bsky.social and collaborators: "Understanding ecological systems using knowledge graphs: an application to highly pathogenic avian influenza" 🔓 academic.oup.com/bioinformati...

stopover duration of waterfowl predicts HPAI infection probability in backyard poultry from waterfowl, but ttiming has no effect. virulence and immunity impact the transmission risk to backyard poultry.
👉 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Genomics of novel influenza A virus (H18N12) in bats, Caribe Colombia - Scientific Reports Scientific Reports - Genomics of novel influenza A virus (H18N12) in bats, Caribe Colombia

New research alert! 🚨
Our paper describing the first evidence of the novel H18N12 Flu in Albiventris bats is out in @natureportfolio.nature.com Scientific Reports.
Huge shoutout to my friend and colleague Daniel for leading this work.

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Zoonotic Host Richness in the Global Wildland–Urban Interface In the wildland–urban interface (WUI), where human settlements abut or intermix with wildlands, people may encounter animals that host zoonotic pathogens, which can spillover to cause human disease. ...

New paper led by Rohan Simkin exploring global patterns of zoonotic hosts in the wildland-urban interface. WUIs are a complex and expanding contact zone with many potential host species that are likely to be consequential for spillover transmission on a rapidly urbanizing planet. bit.ly/WUI-zdx

Preprint out by me, Greg Albery, Barbara Han (@bahanbug.bsky.social ), and Amy Sweeny about how coinfection dynamics affect our ability to measure parasite/pathogen diversity. This research was funded by @viralemergence.org. ecoevorxiv.org/repository/v... 🧪🧵(1/4)

We get data *from* the WHO. Without this, we're flying blind with data regarding evolution of infectious agents globally, putting us behind if we need to develop vaccines & treatments, just for one aspect. This puts the whole country at risk.

Call your senators! Do it today! It's better than wallowing

Very excited to see this paper out in the world. Absolutely monumental effort by @gorkalasso.bsky.social et al. to predict which filoviruses are likely to infect which bat species. Check out the thread below for details!

Top panels: graphs showing increases in spillover events, extinction rates, and temperature anomalies over the last few centuries. Bottom panel: a map of 10 pandemics since the year 1900. Four were linked to agriculture, two to wildlife use, and one to climate change.

🚨😷🧪 NEW: A growing body of evidence shows that pandemics, biodiversity loss, and climate change are part of a broader polycrisis - but there are no simple solutions. A sweeping overview of "Pathogens and planetary change" for the first issue of @natrevbiodiv.bsky.social, out now 🔓 rdcu.be/d6lHl

Hi! I'm new to blue sky, and I have a new preprint out! 🥳🥳 This work is the first chapter of my dissertation: biorxiv.org/content/10.1... The study was completed with the @viralemergence.org with support from @danjbecker.bsky.social, @colincarlson.bsky.social, and Amanda Vicente-Santos ☺️🦇⚕️🦠👩‍🔬 (1/5)

Development of avian influenza A(H5) virus datasets for Nextclade enables rapid and accurate clade assignment The ongoing panzootic of highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) A(H5) viruses is the largest in history, with unprecedented transmission to multiple mammalian species. Avian influenza A viruses of t...

Really important work from the Moncla lab led by Jordan Ort on H5 clade assignment just preprinted! The framework that was developed is a critical tool to study virus evolution and epidemiology.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Hello influenza enthusiasts! You may be interested in our recent publication linked below. We used multi-strain serology to figure out who got infected with which A/H3N2 influenza strain and when, allowing us to reconstruct epidemiological patterns back to 1968 stratified by time, age and location.

Graphs showing clinical presentation % by age for dengue, chikungunya, and Zika, shown for 30 symptoms or case features

New preprint 🦠‼️ How do you tell apart dengue, chikungunya, and Zika? Big findings in 19 years of pediatric cohort data: lots of afebrile cases of dengue and Zika, which would be missed by most case definitions, and look very similar; plus, big differences by age. 🔓👉 www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...

Molecular Epidemiology, Evolution, and Transmission Dynamics of Raccoon Rabies Virus (RRV) in Connecticut Abstract. In North America, raccoon rabies virus (RRV) is of public health concern given its potential for rapid spread, maintenance in wildlife, and impac

check out this really cool work just published on raccoon rabies by the very talented @gabriella-veytsel.bsky.social ! academic.oup.com/ve/advance-a...

Yes we repeat our domestic wild analysis but added third state for turkey after confirming with some folks that those sequences were indeed commercial turkey. We saw that wild birds were transmitting to them at a high rate and interestingly we saw high rates from turkeys to other domestic birds.

Thanks Colin! Cant wait to hear what you think and any feedback you might have. We performed a supplementary analysis to study the involvement of turkeys in the wild-domestic transmission because of a question you gave Louise when she visited and it turned out to be pretty interesting!

Intensive transmission in wild, migratory birds drove rapid geographic dissemination and repeated spillovers of H5N1 into agriculture in North America Since late 2021, a panzootic of highly pathogenic H5N1 avian influenza virus has driven significant morbidity and mortality in wild birds, domestic poultry, and mammals. In North America, infections i...

Really excited to share that my postdoctoral work on HPAI in North America is now preprinted! Please feel free to reach out with any feedback and thoughts! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...