Centre de recherche
Conférence scientifique du vendredi midi - Christina Guzzo || 19 mai
Finding fingerprints on viruses; why and how we should study them
vendredi 19 mai 2023 de 12:00 à 13:00
CONFÉRENCE SCIENTIFIQUE DE L'AXE Maladies infectieuses et soins aigus
Conférencière
- Christina Guzzo, PhD
- Assistante professeure de virologie
- Département des sciences biologiques, University of Toronto Scarborough
Résumé
The global burden of HIV/AIDS remains one of the greatest scientific and public health challenges of our time, with more people infected with HIV today across the globe than the entire population of Canada. Progress in this field requires a better understanding of HIV infection and spread. Indeed, we still lack a complete understanding of where the virus hides once it establishes life-long infection, how the virus interacts with different human immune cells, and how best to eliminate viruses to achieve a cure.
Our lab studies how the surface of HIV viruses can be decorated with a variety of human proteins, resulting in a ‘protein fingerprint’ on the virus surface that can provide new and important clues as to where the virus is hiding. This protein fingerprint also gives the virus new biological properties, such as altered homing in the body and attachment to different immune cells. To study the protein fingerprint on viruses, we are pioneering new experimental methods in flow virometry, which is the adaptation of flow cytometry techniques for nanoparticle analyses. Our flow virometry methods enable us to analyze single virus particles in their native state with high-throughput efficiency, with the added advantage to quantify the number of protein molecules per virus particle. In future, our discoveries of new proteins on HIV virions could guide the development of more effective anti-viral treatments and/or vaccine designs, including those that consider targeting both human and viral proteins present on viruses. Furthermore, our work provides new research tools that could be easily applied to studies on other nanoparticles, including extracellular vesicles .
Date et lieu
Vendredi 19 mai de 12h à 13h
- En présence: Amphithéâtre 125
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