Overview
This event is led by Microbiology Horizons and is the fourth instalment of a webinar series. Each webinar explores a different perspective on the rapidly evolving role of artificial intelligence in microbiology, covering cutting-edge research, emerging methods, and real-world applications across policy, public health, and industry. Every session wraps up with an interactive Q&A, ensuring your questions are addressed. To find out more about our new journal, visit Microbiology Horizons.
This session will take place on 18 January 2027 at 09:00-10:30 GMT.
Spotlight on AI in microbiology—AI for Viral Infectious Disease
With guest speaker Jumpei Ito (The University of Osaka, Japan) and a panel comprising Microbiology Horizons editors.
Chaired by Editor-in-Chief of Microbiology Horizons, Tania Dottorini (King's College London, UK).
Jumpei Ito conducts research on AI for viral infectious diseases. In recent years, his work has focused particularly on two areas: (1) integrative modeling of viral genotype, antigenicity, and fitness for applications in vaccine antigen design, and (2) the development of host transcriptome–based approaches to efficiently detect viral infections in livestock and wildlife populations to enhance preparedness for future pandemics.
Jumpei Ito's Google Scholar profile, X, Bluesky, latest publications and website.
The Spotlight Series is an online event series focusing on content published across the Society’s publishing portfolio and other topics of relevance to our journals and to our authors. Spotlighting interesting studies, emerging and hot topics, and innovative and exciting research, these short online events will feature authors and editors from our publishing portfolio as speakers, giving unique insight into the stories behind the science.
To respect all our delegates' privacy, we request that you do not take screen grabs, photos, or record any of the content, names, people, and research during this webinar. We also remind everyone attending our events that some people may feel uncomfortable with their name, image, or research being posted to social media platforms. A recording of the event will be made available to Microbiology Society members shortly afterwards.
Abstract
Talk title: AI for Viral Infectious Disease
Abstract: One of the major challenges in controlling viral infectious diseases is that viruses continuously change their properties through evolution. I will present our work on understanding and predicting viral evolution and epidemic dynamics by integrating protein language models, massive viral genome sequence data, and large-scale experimental datasets. Specifically, I will introduce CoVFit, an AI model that predicts the fitness of SARS-CoV-2, and PLANT, an AI model that predicts the antigenicity of seasonal influenza viruses, and then discuss future directions.
Another factor that complicates the control of viral infectious diseases is the cross-species transmission of viruses harbored by wild animals to humans and livestock, which gives rise to emerging infectious diseases. To prepare for future pandemics, it is essential to comprehensively identify the viruses circulating in wildlife populations. I will also present ISG Profiler, our approach for efficiently discovering novel viruses from wild and formed animals in massive public RNA-seq datasets by inferring viral infection from host immune responses.
Registration
This event is free to members, with a small fee of £10 for non-member attendees.
Technology
All seminars will be run via Zoom, a link for which will be sent to you via email prior to the meeting. Please ensure you have updated to the latest version of the Zoom desktop or mobile application (version 5.3 or higher is recommended). Please note all times listed are in UK time.
To respect all our delegates' privacy, we request that you do not take screen grabs, photos, or record any of the content, names, people, and research during this webinar. We also remind everyone attending our events that some people may feel uncomfortable with their name, image, or research being posted to social media platforms. A recording of the event will be made available to Microbiology Society members shortly afterwards.