Systematic Identification and Characterization of Cellular Factors Required for Virus Infection

病毒是简单的细胞内寄生虫，依靠宿主进行复制。一旦它们感染，病毒就会劫持或控制我们细胞中的许多不同的蛋白质。它们这样做是为了关闭人体的防御系统，制造新的病毒，然后传播给下一个宿主。我们的主要目标是识别和解开病毒与宿主之间的相互作用。揭开所有这些相互作用是具有挑战性的，因为它们很多，而且往往非常复杂。此外，我们不知道哪些基因对感染过程是最重要的。人类基因组研究的最新进展使我们能够采取公正的方法来解决这个问题。我们现在可以逐一消除细胞中的每一种蛋白质，并询问它的丢失对病毒有何影响。这种方法非常强大，因为我们可以同时测试许多细胞蛋白质，以快速识别重要的蛋白质。一旦我们确定了这些细胞蛋白，我们就会更深入地挖掘，以找出为什么它们对病毒如此重要，以及我们是否可以利用这些信息来更好地了解未来如何对抗病毒感染。

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.