On November 26th, 2016 Professor Yongzhen Zhang from China CDC was invited to visit our college and gave a talk on his recent breakthrough in seeking new viruses that was published online in Nature, 23 November 2016, entitled “Redefining the invertebrate RNA virosphere”. In this work Zhang and his colleagues profiled the transcriptomes of over 220 invertebrate species sampled across nine animal phyla and reported the discovery of 1,445 RNA viruses, including some that are sufficiently divergent to comprise new families. The identified viruses fill major gaps in the RNA virus phylogeny and reveal an evolutionary history that is characterized by both host switching and co-divergence. These new findings present a view of the RNA virosphere that is more phylogenetically and genomically diverse than that depicted in current classification schemes and have raised broad attention worldwide. Over 200 students and faculties attended his presentation and had fruitful communications during his visit.

(Edited by Ying Wu and Wei Hou)