Mathematics and Statistics Colloquium
An automated workflow for plant virus diagnostics using high-throughput genome sequencing data
Date: Friday, Oct. 27
Time: 3:30 pm
Location: Arts Building Room 206, 9 Campus Dr., Saskatoon
Free and open to the public
About this event
A talk by Dr. Xuekui Zhang (PhD) of the University of Victoria, hosted by the USask Department of Mathematics and Statistics
Plant virus infection causes enormous economic loss: $350 billion worldwide in 2021. We focus on grapevine viruses, which caused Canadian grape growers’ annual loss of over $23 million. Once infected by a virus, the grapevine remains infected for life and must be replaced, since no therapeutic treatments are available. So, diagnosis of virus infection is critical for disease control. Collaborating with researchers from CFIA and other institutes, we are developing a genomic-sequencing-based diagnostic test to detect virus infections of grapevines.
My team's role is to develop method/software to decide if a sample is infected by any virus (from a list of ~1,000 viruses) based on its genomic sequencing data. In this talk, I will briefly discuss some research results from this project.
More information about this project can be found online.
Info: colloquium@math.usask.ca
Upcoming Events
7 Nights of History: An Inconvenient Ally: Margaret Thatcher and Climate Change
Oct 29, 2025
A community lecture by Dr. Jim Clifford (PhD) of the Department of History
8th Metropolis Identities Conference
Oct 29-30, 2025
Department of Sociology professor Dr. Kara Somerville (PhD) co-chairs this Saskatoon conference on reaffirming Canada
Greystone Theatre: Doctor Faustus and the Disco Inferno Cabaret
Oct 31, 2025
The wildly successful student-created masterwork returns