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University of Cambridge

Scalable Tools for High-throughput Viral Sequence Analysis

Abstract

dc:description.abstract

Viral sequence data are increasingly being used to estimate evolutionary and epidemiological parameters to understand the dynamics of viral diseases. This thesis focuses on developing novel and improved computational methods for high-throughput analysis of large viral sequence datasets. I have developed a novel computational pipeline, Pipelign, to detect potentially unrelated sequences from groups of viral sequences during sequence alignment. Pipelign detected a large number of unrelated and mis-annotated sequences from several viral sequence datasets collected from GenBank. I subsequently developed ANVIL, a machine learning-based recombination detection and subtyping framework for pathogen sequences. ANVIL's performance was benchmarked using two large HIV datasets collected from the Los Alamos HIV Sequence Database and the UK HIV Drug Resistance Database, as well as on simulated data. Finally, I present a computational pipeline named Phlow, for rapid phylodynamic inference of heterochronous pathogen sequence data. Phlow is implemented with specialised and published analysis tools to infer important phylodynamic parameters from large datasets. Phlow was run with three empirical viral datasets and their outputs were compared with published results. These results show that Phlow is suitable for high-throughput exploratory phylodynamic analysis of large viral datasets. When combined, these three novel computational tools offer a comprehensive system for large scale viral sequence analysis addressing three important aspects: 1) establishing accurate evolutionary history, 2) recombination detection and subtyping, and 3) inferring phylodynamic history from heterochronous sequence datasets.

Degree

thesis:*
Name dc:type.qualificationname
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Level dc:type.qualificationlevel
Doctoral
Grantor dc:publisher.institution
University of Cambridge
Year dc:date.issued
2017

Author and committee

dc:creator, dc:contributor.*
Author dc:creator
  • Hossain, A S Md Mukarram
Advisor dc:contributor.advisor
  • Frost, Simon

Subjects

dc:subject × 6

Rights

dc:rights
Language dc:language
en

Identifiers

dc:identifier.*
DOI dc:identifier.doi
https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.23510
OAI identifier oai:identifier
oai:www.repository.cam.ac.uk:1810/276228

Chain of custody

source
Harvested from
Cambridge University
Base URL
api.repository.cam.ac.uk/server/oai/request
Last updated
2026-07-22
Source record
OAI-PMH GetRecord
citation

Hossain, A S Md Mukarram. Scalable Tools for High-throughput Viral Sequence Analysis. Doctoral thesis, University of Cambridge, 2017. https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.23510