Kristian G. AndersenGeverifieerd account

We have done a sort of blog post/tutorial on local molecular clocks to look at an interesting latency phenomenon in Ebola virus in non-human hosts. This is work in progress based on genomes published recently by DRC/INRB from current and recent outbreaks. http://beast.community/ebov_local_clocks.html …

It is really for phylogeny geeks but it may have some interesting implications for the nature of the non-human hosts of Ebola virus between outbreaks. Currently working on an explicit model of this process.

And it has an interactive root-to-tip divergence plot to play with.

VERY nice! Glad to see models seem to be able to capture observation, now we just need to figure out the (super weird...) biology behind .

Question - latency up to beginning of outbreak makes sense, but that hypothesis can be directly tested (given data). I.e., what's the clock within each of the two DRC outbreaks? I assume probably the same as other outbreaks? (i.e., close to larger tree).

If yes, then we know that latency is a function of the (reservoir?) host, and not actually something intrinsic to a particular (DRC) Ebola virus lineage. Completely what we would expect, but nice to explicitly test (especially given, ehm, certain papers...).