Research Initiation Award: Mechanisms of Interaction of Glyco-gag with Restriction Factors

研究启动奖为历史悠久的黑人学院和大学的初级和职业生涯中期教师提供支持，他们正在建立新的研究计划或重新定向和重建现有计划。预计该奖项有助于进一步提高教师的研究能力和有效性，改善所在机构的研究和教学，并让本科生参与研究经验。授予萨凡纳州立大学的奖项将产生重大的更广泛的影响，通过强大的导师-学员互动，通过在几个班级增加新的主题和活动，为未被充分代表的少数族裔(URM)学生提供实践研究培训和职业发展机会，提高生物系的研究能力。由于宿主和病毒之间持续的军备竞赛，宿主和病毒在其基因组中都显示出收养的特征。虽然宿主已经形成了限制病毒在感染细胞中复制的限制因素，但一些病毒已经获得了自己独特的辅助蛋白，可以抵消宿主限制因素。最近的报道表明，小鼠伽玛逆转录病毒中的一个辅助蛋白可以通过未知的机制对抗两个宿主限制因子，从而促进其复制，它将成为阐明宿主与病毒相互作用的新机制的有力工具。该项目的长期目标是阐明宿主-病毒相互作用的详细机制，并确定病毒附件蛋白如何在细胞和生物水平上调节病毒复制。该提案旨在识别和表征能够中和宿主因素的新病毒蛋白，阐明逆转录病毒蛋白如何与宿主因素相互作用，并通过计算分析描述宿主-病毒的共同进化。预期的结果将增进对先天免疫和宿主-病毒共同进化的基本方面的了解，从而大大提高对遗传学、病毒学和细胞生物学的基础知识的理解。这一奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Research Initiation Awards provide support for junior and mid-career faculty at Historically Black Colleges and Universities who are building new research programs or redirecting and rebuilding existing programs. It is expected that the award helps to further the faculty member's research capability and effectiveness, improves research and teaching at the home institution, and involves undergraduate students in research experiences. The award to Savannah State University will provide significant broader impacts by providing hands-on research training and career development opportunities to underrepresented minority (URM) students through strong mentor-mentee interactions, by advancing research capability of the biology department, and by adding new topics and activities in several classes. As a consequence of the continuous arms race between hosts and viruses, both hosts and viruses show signatures of adoption in their genome. While hosts have developed restriction factors that limit viral replication in the infected cells, some viruses have acquired their own unique accessory proteins that could counteract the host restriction factors. Recent reports have demonstrated that one accessory protein in a mouse gammaretrovirus can facilitate its replication by counteracting two host restriction factors through unknown mechanisms, and it will be a powerful tool to clarify novel mechanisms in host-viral interactions. The long-term goal of this project is to clarify the detailed mechanisms of host-virus interactions, and determine how viral accessory proteins regulate viral replication at cellular and organismal levels. The proposal aims to identify and characterize new viral proteins that can counteract host factors, clarify how the retroviral proteins interact with the host factors, and describe host-virus co-evolution through computational analysis. The expected outcomes will advance knowledge on fundamental aspects of innate-immunity and host-virus co-evolution, and thus will substantially enhance understanding and advance fundamental knowledge in genetics, virology and cell biology.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.