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。一旦感染，病毒就会劫持或控制我们细胞中的许多不同蛋白质。它们这样做是为了关闭身体的防御系统，并制造新的病毒，然后传播到下一个宿主。我们的主要目标是识别和揭示病毒与其宿主之间的相互作用。揭示所有这些相互作用是具有挑战性的，因为它们有很多，而且往往非常复杂。此外，我们不知道哪些是最重要的感染过程。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。我们现在可以一个接一个地消除细胞中的每一种蛋白质，并询问其损失如何影响病毒。这种方法非常强大，因为我们可以同时测试许多细胞蛋白，以快速识别重要的蛋白。一旦我们确定了这些细胞蛋白，我们就会深入挖掘，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如何在未来对抗病毒感染。

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.