The viral fusosome: a modular machinery for cargo delivery to target cells

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The delivery of proteins, RNA and DNA into cells is a critical process in normal cellular biology, virus infection and biotechnology applications such as gene editing. Enveloped viruses achieve this maneuver with exquisite efficiency and specificity using a complex machinery mediating their fusion with cellular membranes for stealth genome delivery. Remarkably, all characterised viral fusion proteins belong to only 3 classes defined >16 years ago and sharing surprisingly conserved mechanisms. We identified a novel class of fusion proteins with unique architecture in ubiquitous insect viruses. The Project will elucidate the structural and functional hallmarks of this fusion machinery providing a platform for its engineering.