RdRp Summit 2025 Program
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Day 1 – May 11, 2025
10:00 – 10:10 am
Welcome & Opening Remarks
Speaker: Ingrida Olendraite (VUGENE – Vilnius, Lithuania)
An introduction to the RdRp Summit and a welcome to all participants.
10:10 – 10:40 am
Introduction = The RdRp summit initiative : An overview of the last 2 years
Keynote talk : An overview of the initiative based on the 2023 consensus statement perspectives.
Speakers: Li Chuin Chong (Twincore GmbH / MHH / DKFZ – Hannover, Germany) and Hisham Shaikh (Ghent University – Ghent, Belgium)
10:40 – 12:20 am
Session 1 = RNA Virus Categorization (Classification, Taxonomy & Naming)
Chair: Uri Neri (Joint Genome Institute – California, USA)
Keynote talk : Perspectives on the ICTV Computational Taxonomy Challenge
Speaker: Cedric Lood (University of Oxford – Oxford, UK)
High-throughput taxonomic assignments of environmental viromes based on the ICTV taxonomy framework.
Speaker: Kaiyang Zheng (Ocean University of China – Qingdao, China)
Tracing Viral Histories: When and Where watermelon mosaic virus and grapevine pinot gris virus emerged.
Speaker: Karima Ben Mansour (Czech Agrifood Research Center- Prague, Czechia)
Phosphate amendment drives bloom of RNA phages after soil wet-up.
Speakers : Ella Tali Sieradzki (Aarhus University – Aarhus, DK)
12:20 – 01:40 pm – LUNCH BREAK
01:40 – 03:20 pm
Session 2 = Best Practices, Standards, and Annotations
Chair: Anne Kupczok (Wageningen University & Research – The Netherlands)
Keynote talk : Minimum Information about an Uncultivated Virus Genome (MiUViG v2) and best practices in viral genome annotation.
Speaker: Luke Hillary (University of California, Davis – Davis, USA)
suvtk: making viral genome submission FAIRly easy.
Speakers : Lander De Coninck (KU Leuven – Leuven, Belgium)
The Global RNA Virome in Urban Environments
Speakers : Alexander Lucaci (Weill Cornell Medicine – New York, USA)
Metagenomic analysis of viral diversity in norwegian rats from Serbia
Speakers : Vladimir Gajdov (Scientific Veterinary Institute Novi Sad – Novi Sad, Serbia) (remote)
03:20 – 03:50 pm – AFTERNOON TEA
03:50 – 05:30 pm
Session 3 = Sequencing & Extraction methodologies for RNA virus discovery
Chair: Marco Forgia (Istituto per la Protezione Sostenibile delle Piante – CNR – Turin, Italy)
Keynote talk : Nanopore sequencing for viral detection and surveillance.
Speaker: Anja Pecman (National Institute of Biology – Ljubljana, Slovenia)
Different bio-fractionation methods select for unique DNA and RNA viruses, and unearth a multifaceted relationship between viruses and soil moisture
Speakers : Josue Rodriguez-Ramos (Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, – Washington state, USA) (remote)
Portable viral genomic surveillance with ViMOP, an easy-to-use Nanopore field sequencing analysis tool
Speakers : Mia Le (Bernhard Nocht Institute for Tropical Medicine – Hamburg, Deutschland).
Detection of viral sequences at single-cell resolution reveals putative novel viruses perturbing host gene expression
Speakers : Laura Luebbert (Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard – Massachusetts, USA)
05:30 – 06:00 pm
Community Project – part 1 (Launch Session)
Keynote talk : RdRpCATCH: A unified framework for RNA virus discovery based on RdRp profile databases.
Speaker: Dimitris Karapliafis (Wageningen University & Research – Netherlands)
Flash talks : to introduce new collaborative project ideas within our community.
Speakers: Every participant who’s interested in launching an initiative.
Day 2 – May 12, 2025
9:00 – 10:00 am
Session 5 = Data Mining and Metadata Analysis in RNA virus discovery
Chair: Justine Charon (Research Institute for Agronomy, Food and Environment (INRAE) – Bordeaux, France)
Keynote talk : Logan: Planetary-scale assembly of DNA/RNA sequencing data.
Speaker: Rayan Chikhi (Pasteur Institute – Paris, France)
Identifying and characterising endogenous viral elements amongst uncharacterised proteins in public protein databases.
Speakers : Katy Brown (University of Cambridge – Cambridge, UK)
PREDICTORix: A scalable phylogeny-aware approach for quantifying viral spillover risk
Speakers : Li Chuin Chong (Twincore GmbH / MHH / DKFZ – Hannover, Germany)
PCI Sponsor talk : Peer Community In (PCI), PCI Plants and Peer Community Journal: from preprint recommendation to diamond open access publication
Speakers : Barbara Class (PCI support officer)
10:40 – 11:10 am – MORNING TEA
11:10 am – 12:50 pm
Session 6 = Viral Dark Matter: Detecting Divergent Viruses
Chair: Rachid Tahzima (Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) – Brussels, Belgium)
Keynote talk #1 : Using artificial intelligence to document the hidden RNA virosphere.
Speaker: Xin Hou (Pasteur Institute – Paris, France)
Keynote talk #2 : BFVD-Foldseek: An integrative structure-based approach to highlight viral dark matter
Speaker: Rachel Seongeun Kim (Seoul National University – Seoul, Republic of Korea)
Soaring above profound depths of RdRP diversity
Speakers: Gytis Dudas (Vilnius University Life Sciences Center – Vilnius, Lithuania)
12:50 – 02:10 pm – LUNCH BREAK
02:10 – 03:40 pm
Community Project – part 2 (Group discussion)
Participants can gather into study groups to discuss/develop the collaborative initiatives introduced during day 1.
03:40 – 04:10 pm – AFTERNOON TEA
04:10 – 05:20 pm
Conclusion = The RdRp summit initiative : A projection for the next 2 years
Keynote talk : EVBC Projects and Initiatives – Introduction to the database project
Speaker: Noriko Cassman (Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Jena – Germany)
Community projects = main discussion outcomes/perspectives.
Speakers (flash talks): Selected community project representatives.
Future perspectives, Announcements & Closing remarks
* Discussion : How to consolidate our community, to improve our inclusivity, to carry out community-based initiatives, to keep it active (etc…) ? Come with your ideas to make the RdRp summit a great and long-term story !
* Announcements for upcoming initiatives, workshops, jobs (etc…)
* Formation of the RdRp summit 2027 Organizing / Scientific Committee
* Closing remarks