We may be used to thinking of evolution as a slow, gradual process which takes place over thousands if not millions of years. However, viruses can evolve over the course of weeks or even days and we can watch it happen in the lab or in the outside world. In the middle of the current COVID-19 pandemic, we have been exposed to viral evolution on a grand scale. What lets viruses jump between animals and humans? Should we worry about viral mutations? Will SARS-CoV-2 become more or less deadly? How do viruses evolve resistance to drugs? Why do you need a new flu vaccine each year but a measles vaccine lasts your whole life?

To answer these questions, we need to understand viral evolution. This talk will show how we can see the effects of viral evolution in the world currently around us and how we can use viruses in the lab to test evolutionary ideas. Evolution happens fastest at the smallest scale.

Dr. Daniel Goldhill did his undergraduate degree in Biology at Oxford where he was inspired by reading about evolution but really wanted to do experiments to make it happen. He did his PhD in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Yale University evolving bacteriophages (viruses of bacteria) in the lab to try to understand how mutations in the genetic material of the bacteriophage lead to changes in proteins and changes in the properties of the virus. After his PhD, he moved to the UK to a joint position between PHE and Imperial College London to work on influenza virus. His project involved evolving influenza virus in the lab to become resistant to a new antiviral drug called favipiravir that could be used against flu.

In 2020, he has been part of the effort to understand SARS-CoV-2 and as a member of Professor Wendy Barclay’s lab at Imperial College. Though he hasn’t been evolving the virus in the lab yet, he has been trying to understand what are the changes to the virus that make SARS-CoV-2 able to cause a pandemic.