Think Like a Scientist: Natural Selection in an Outbreak

This video focuses on the front lines of the 2013–2016 Ebola outbreak in West Africa and explains how scientists monitored the evolution of the virus by analyzing its genome.

Computational geneticist Pardis Sabeti and disease ecologist Lina Moses discuss how the 2013–2016 Ebola outbreak in West Africa became the largest Ebola outbreak in history. Sabeti worked with colleagues in Sierra Leone to monitor the evolution of the virus by analyzing its genome in samples from infected individuals. As the Ebola virus replicates in people, it mutates. Mutations that provide the virus with an advantage will increase in frequency in the population.

An audio descriptive version of the film is available via our media player.