Dante Felipe Travisany Flores
Dante Travisany is a Professor at Universidad de las Américas (CL), a researcher from the Center for Mathematical Modeling and the Center for Genome Regulation in Chile. He is a Bioinformatics Engineer and a Ph.D. in Complex Systems Engineering. He participated in several projects, from reconstructing the genomes and communities of extremophilic microorganisms isolated from copper mines in northern Chile, these microorganisms are related to copper bioleaching processes. The genomes and transcriptomes of fruit trees, such as sultanina grapes, raspberries, and cherries. Up to the complete genome sequencing of Mapuche-Huilliche, which has served to understand the Amerindian component of the Chilean population. He managed to assemble the pathogen Piscirickettsia salmonis fully, a complex genome to reconstruct due to its large number of repeats. This pathogen is one of the leading causes of salmon diseases in Chilean fish farms and reports millions of USD losses in this industry. The knowledge of its genome is cur rently used to design strategies to mitigate the salmonid rickettsial syndrome. Since the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, Dr. Travisany has been part of the CoV-2 Genomes Consortium, which has generated a strong push in sequencing, analyzing, and establishing genomic surveillance for the coronavirus in Chile. He has been researching and working on the correct way to process, analyze, identify variants and visualize the data of Chilean and international SARS-CoV-2 genomes. He has coordinated the generation of the apps and databases of the Genomes Consortium page CoV-2 www.cov2.cl and the implementation of tools like Auspice to visualize the data.
Title:
Towards a bioinformatics platform for Chilean SARS-CoV-2 genomes.
Abstract:
The first cases of COVID-19 in Chile were detected in March 2020. Since then, the Chilean scientific community has contributed to the effort to track and mitigate the effects of the disease, and multidisciplinary teams have been organized to address several tasks from diagnostics to the development of medical devices. A special effort is Genome sequencing, which has proven crucial to many countries' health authorities and decision-makers to carry out variant surveillance, monitor outbreaks, and transmission routes, maintain robust testing methods, and check for vaccine efficacy. This talk addresses the experience developed from the "Consorcio Genomas CoV2" (CGC), the Chilean Consortium of the SARS-CoV-2 genomes. The group has developed molecular improvements to molecular methodologies, sequenced, assembled, and compared SARS-CoV-2 Genomes using the National Laboratory for High-Performance Computing (https://nlhpc.cl). These results are shown in a web platform (https://cov2.cl) that implements state-of-the-art software and a custom dashboard to inform the Chilean community about the status of genome sequencing and the several variants found in Chile. We expect that our methods and experience could be shared with the scientific community of Latin america.