Katie Kistler

Postdoc
GitHub

I am a Molecular and Cellular Biology graduate student in the Bedford lab. I am broadly interested in studying the process of evolution including how host/pathogen interactions sculpt genomes, how fossils of selective forces like these can be seen in sequence data, and how epistasis constrains evolutionary potential. In the Bedford lab, I have recently focused on identifying and describing adaptive evolution in coronaviruses using phylogenetic and sequenced-based methods. Before this, I studied mutations that occur when human influenza H3N2 is passaged in eggs during vaccine production, found epistatic interactions between them, and predicted the antigenic impact of these mutations.

Papers

An atlas of continuous adaptive evolution in endemic human viruses

Positive selection underlies repeated knockout of ORF8 in SARS-CoV-2 evolution

A Bayesian approach to infer recombination patterns in coronaviruses

Rapid and parallel adaptive mutations in spike S1 drive clade success in SARS-CoV-2

Evidence for adaptive evolution in the receptor-binding domain of seasonal coronaviruses OC43 and 229E

Projects

seasonal-cov-adaptive-evolution - Nextstrain builds for seasonal coronavirus