Systematic Identification and Characterization of Cellular Factors Required for Virus Infection

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Viruses are simple intracellular parasites that depend on their hosts for replication. Once they infect, viruses hijack or take control of many different proteins in our cells. They do this to shut down the body’s defenses and to make new viruses that can then spread to the next host. Our main goal is to identify and unravel the interactions between viruses and their hosts. Uncovering all of these interactions is challenging because there are many and they are often very complex. Also, we do not know which ones are the most important for the infection process.Recent advances in human genome research allow us to take an unbiased approach to this problem. We can now eliminate each protein in a cell, one-by-one, and ask how its loss affects the virus. This approach is extremely powerful because we can test many cell proteins at the same time to rapidly identify the important ones. Once we identify these cell proteins, we dig deeper to find out why they are so important to the virus and if we can use this information to better understand how to fight viral infections in the future.