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A new era, where AI is at the centre of the drug discovery process is emerging, says Charlotte Deane, a professor of structural bioinformatics at Oxford University, who develops freely available AI tools to help pharmaceutical companies and others improve their drug discovery.

“The breadth of vector research has something for everyone whether you are an entomologist that likes bugs, taxonomy and systematics, ecology, disease epidemiology, protein biochemistry and bioinformatics, genomics or field studies. The more we learn about hemophages, the more we realize how intricate they are. You must admire them for their complexity. Even if they turn out to be living nightmares.”

Tim Sackton, director of Bioinformatics for the FAS Informatics Group at Harvard University, notes that while we can easily look at a sequenced genome and identify where the genes that code for proteins are, the other parts that control where and when these genes are expressed is something we’re still trying to figure out.

“The sort of simple way that I typically define convergent evolution,” Tim Sackton, director of bioinformatics at Harvard University’s FAS Informatics Group, told Salon, “is if there’s a trait that you see in some species, whatever it is, that evolved independently.”

Karlseder and colleagues collaborated closely with experts at Oxford Nanopore Technologies to combine aspects of their long-read sequencing technique with novel biochemistry and bioinformatics approaches.