Artem Babaian
Appointment
CIFAR Azrieli Global Scholar 2025-2027
Fungal Kingdom: Threats & Opportunities
About
Biology is undergoing a revolutionary change driven by explosive data growth and improvements in artificial intelligence to interpret that data. Today, there are about $50 billion dollars of freely available DNA sequencing data (100 million gigabytes) that have accumulated from labs all over the world from the past 15 years. Our research group focuses on developing state-of-the-art computational tools to re-analyze all these data and answer questions such as “What RNA viruses are hidden around us?”, “Can we discover new fungal enzymes with which we can recycle plastic with ultra-high efficiency?”, or “Can we identify genes in fungi which make new cancer therapies?”
Awards
- Temerty Medicine Research Excellence Award, University of Toronto, 2024
- Early Career Investigator, Gairdner Foundation, 2023
- Research Symbiont Award (ECR), Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing, 2023
- Banting Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Cambridge, 2021
- Roman M. Babicki Fellow, University of British Columbia, 2017, 2018
Relevant Publications
- Edgar, R. C., Taylor, B., Lin, V., Altman, T., Barbera, P., Meleshko, D., Lohr, D., Novakovsky, G., Buchfink, B., Al-Shayeb, B., Banfield, J. F., de la Peña, M., Korobeynikov, A., Chikhi, R., & Babaian, A. (2022). Petabase-scale sequence alignment catalyses viral discovery. Nature, 602(7895), Article 7895. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-04332-2
- Forgia, M., Navarro, B., Daghino, S., Cervera, A., Gisel, A., Perotto, S., Aghayeva, D. N., Akinyuwa, M. F., Gobbi, E., Zheludev, I. N., Edgar, R. C., Chikhi, R., Turina, M., Babaian, A., Di Serio, F., & de la Peña, M. (2023). Hybrids of RNA viruses and viroid-like elements replicate in fungi. Nature Communications, 14(1), 2591. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-023-38301-2
- Gupta, P., Hiller, A., Chowdhury, J., Lim, D., Lim, D. Y., Saeij, J. P. J., Babaian, A., Rodriguez, F., Pereira, L., & Morales-Tapia, A. (2024). A parasite odyssey: An RNA virus concealed in Toxoplasma gondii. Virus Evolution, 10(1), veae040. https://doi.org/10.1093/ve/veae040