Success stories
University of Pavia – Biotechnology Department
10 September 2020

Arthropod-borne viruses (arboviruses) are transmitted by mosquito vectors and cause serious infectious diseases in humans, such and Dengue fever, Chikungunya and the notorious Zika virus. Understanding the co-evolutionary processes among viruses and vectors is essential to develop novel strategies to block transmissions.

The Bonizzoni Laboratory was granted with European Research Council (ERC) Consolidator to study population genomics of coevolution between non-retroviral RNA viruses and their hosts. In collaboration with the Biotechnology Department of the University of Pavia, we implemented and deployed a bioinformatics workflow, based on freely available tools and proprietary software, with the aim of identifying sequences from insect-specific viruses and arboviruses integrated into the genome of different individuals, from different populations.

The developed state of the art workflow was initially run on Amazon Web Services (AWS) to analyses a time and resource consuming batch of samples that would have been otherwise a huge bottleneck, and subsequently deployed on a dedicated hardware for daily analysis and NGS data management.