Computational Biology Group

: Overview and News

We’re happy to announce our study on tracing influenza A from wastewater. We developed a novel tiling amplicon approach, enabling deep genomic coverage of influenza A. The method allows for robust identification of circulating influenza A clades as well as vaccine-site and drug-target mutations, generating data that can inform public health interventions. Our method is now part of nationwide wastewater surveillance efforts: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0043135425013570 .

Wastewater-based epidemiology avoids many biases of clinical testing but can potentially have its own. Using mathematical modelling, simulations, and Swiss data, we show that pathogen shedding, even when differing between genomic variants, does not bias key metrics such as selection advantage, supporting wastewater monitoring as a reliable tool for continued surveillance: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-62790-y.

We are excited to share our latest research published in Nature Genetics, where we could detect genetic heterogeneity within circulating tumor cell clusters that can seed metastases. To do so, we tailor-made a new phylogenetic algorithm "CTC-SCITE": https://www.nature.com/articles/s41588-025-02205-2