Guest Editors
Laura Luebbert
Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard
Dr. Laura Luebbert is a FutureHouse Independent Postdoctoral Fellow and an Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fellow at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, where she collaborates with Prof. Pardis Sabeti. Her research focuses on developing computational methods to discover novel viruses, map the human virome in health and disease, and explore the effects of viral infections on host gene expression. She primarily works with DNA and RNA sequencing data alongside clinical patient datasets. With a wet-lab research and computational science background, Dr. Luebbert is dedicated to bridging the gap between molecular and computational biology to address complex biological questions. She earned her PhD in Computational Biology under the mentorship of Prof. Lior Pachter at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), following a bachelor’s and master’s degree in microbiology and biotechnology from Leiden University in the Netherlands.
Jiayi Duan
Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania
Jiayi Duan is a PhD candidate in the Microbiology, Virology, and Parasitology program within the Cell and Molecular Biology graduate group at the University of Pennsylvania. She conducts her research in Dr. Frederic Bushman’s laboratory. Jiayi earned her Bachelor of Science in Molecular and Cellular Biology from Johns Hopkins University in 2021. From 2019 to 2022, she worked as a research assistant in Dr. Robert Siliciano’s lab at Johns Hopkins, where she focused on the clonal expansion of HIV-infected CD4+ T cells and the persistence of non-suppressible residual viremia in individuals living with HIV. Her current doctoral research investigates the longitudinal dynamics of the oro-respiratory-gut axis virome and its associations with human health.
Collection Overview
Viral detection through DNA and RNA sequencing has become a cornerstone of modern virology. It enables researchers to monitor outbreaks, characterize novel pathogens, track viral evolution, and uncover mechanisms of host-pathogen interaction.
This collection showcases innovative protocols, computational tools, and conceptual advancements that utilize DNA or RNA sequencing to study viruses in diverse systems and settings. Contributions may include wet-lab methods for sample storage and buffer conditions, enrichment of virus-like particles, extraction and amplification of viral DNA/RNA, and library preparation. Additionally, it may cover computational approaches for assembly, identification, annotation, and variant calling, as well as reviews or case studies that demonstrate the application of sequencing in virus discovery, epidemiology, or therapeutic development.
By bringing together diverse experimental and analytical strategies, this collection aims to serve both bench scientists and computational biologists while fostering cross-disciplinary dialogue in the field of viral genomics and transcriptomics.
