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[Biophysics seminar] Mauricio Comas-García: “Understanding selective packaging in Alphaviruses”
17. March, 2022 at 15:00 - 16:00
| Alphaviruses are a genus of positive-sense single-stranded RNA viruses that infect mammals and are transmitted by mosquitos. These viruses can cause a wide range of diseases, from dengue-like symptoms (e.g., Chikungunya virus) to encephalitis (e.g., Venezuelan Equine Encephalitis virus). While during the ’80 and ’90s, there was a great deal of interest in studying these viruses, with time, other pathogens became more attractive for research purposes. However, the spread of the Chikungunya virus during the beginning of the XXI century to Asia, Oceania, and the Americas has brought new attention to these viruses.
These viruses have been widely studied from several aspects; structural biology, epidemiology, and immunology. For example, we know the 3D structure of most of these viruses with almost an atomic detail. Furthermore, a series of in vitro assembly experiments have shed light on some of the key RNA-protein interactions that are needed for core-like-practice assembly. Nonetheless, there is very little information on how these viruses select their genome during infection. Our group has been working on creating a series of plasmids for expression in mammalian cells that contain a series of viral elements from the Chikungunya virus. The goal of these constructs is to generate a system that allows us to carry out competition experiments between mutant and wild-type viral RNAs in infected cells to find the packaging signal in the genomic RNAs that allows for its selective packaging. In this seminar, we will present some preliminary results and the strategy we are following to understand how RNA structure and sequence determine selective packaging in an infected cell. |
| The meeting will take place online via Zoom:
Meeting ID: 833 0750 1179 Passcode: bio |