Symposium / Workshop "Automating Virus Taxonomy"

This summer, we are organizing a Workshop on Automating Virus Taxonomy in Jena, Germany together with the European Virus Bioinformatics Center (EVBC)External link and the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses (ICTV)External link. As metagenomics is rapidly expanding our view of the virosphere, we are looking to make sense of the sequences we discover. The number and diversity of sequences found in viromics dataset is staggering and make their taxonomic classification a daunting task that one would ideally automate. There is currently no ICTV-approved method to approach this question. While the solution will likely not be trivial, we have to face this challenge to keep up with the growth of viruses that we aim to classify. Currently, the demarcation criteria for viral taxa are quite diverse and not encoded in a machine-readable way. We envision a future where the demarcation criteria for all taxoprops are implemented in reproducible computational pipelines, allowing viral sequences to be readily classified into taxa at all ranks. Through this Workshop on Automating Virus Taxonomy, we propose to reinforce the links between virologists and bioinformaticians, and explore ideas for encoding the demarcation criteria in a reproducible way so that they can be applied at a large sc

On the first day, a keynote lecture by Prof. Alexander E. Gorbalenya (Leiden University, the Netherlands) will bring us all on the same page. He will explain why we need taxonomy, sketch the history of ideas that have driven virus taxonomy and the ICTV, and highlight our current challenges. After that, we will invite several virology experts to explain the ins and outs of classifying specific viruses. On the second day, we will invite bioinformaticians to explain how they have implemented automated classification methods. We aim to bring both groups together for discussion sessions with the goal to start or deepen collaborations between participants. This will help us sketch guidelines towards a synthesis of methods to address this challenge.

In addition to this program, we also invite you to join satellite hands-on sessions (2 August 2023) that will focus on automating bioinformatic workflows (SnakemakeExternal link) and virus databases (organized by NFDI4MicrobiotaExternal link).

The workshop is free of charge and can be attended onsite or online. Click here for more information, including the program and registration.External link