From this module the student will understand how genomics can be used to better understand the nature, diversity and mechanisms of evolution of microbes causing human disease, provide more accurate diagnosis, predict which drugs are likely to be more effective and monitor treatment and control of infectious disease in individuals and populations.

The student will learn about the genomic structure of infectious agents, implication of acquisition or loss of nucleotides, genes and plasmids on pathogenicity, sensitivity of a pathogen to drug treatment and response to the host. Students will also be taught about current typing approaches for diagnostics and epidemiology of infectious agents, the surveillance systems operating in the UK and abroad and how genome-based approaches can complement/replace these existing methodologies both locally and internationally.

This module may be particularly interesting to students post-covid as it now covers viral genomics and some of the work around Sars-Cov-2.

In GM5 you will learn about:

• Infection as a cause of national and global morbidity and mortality

• Transmission of human infections: person to person, food and waterborne, sexually transmitted,  vector-borne, zoonosis

• Prokaryotes, their genome, replication and population genetics

• Genomic characterisation of viruses: DNA and RNA genomes, single-stranded, double stranded,  segmented

• Genomic comparisons of microbial strains in the context of outbreaks and transmissions in hospitals and the community

• Anti-infective drug action

• Mutation rate and drug resistance

• Genomic evidence of individual susceptibility to specific infection

•  Methods and systems for typing and tracking infectious disease locally and internationally.

•  Role of genomics in: infectious disease diagnosis, prognosis, drug selection, resistance, monitoring, epidemic control, drug research

By the end of this module students will be able to:

• Explain the differences between prokaryote and eukaryote genomes

• Discuss and appraise how the genome sequence of pathogens can be used to track cross infection and outbreaks of infections among the population

• Critically evaluate the emerging action of drugs in controlling infection e.g. Shigella, E-coli, HIV, TB

• Critically evaluate the molecular basis of organism drug resistance in some infections and how this directs drug research

• Evaluate how sequencing of the genome of infective organisms can be used in infectious disease for assessing: diagnosis, sub-classification and strain identity, pathogenicity, drug resistance and drug selection; and for epidemic control