Taylor, Lily
Lily is in the Biochemistry, Molecular and Structural Biology Graduate Program, and joined the CMB Training Program in 2022.
Mentor: Dr. Jose Rodriguez
New World Hemorrhagic Fever Mammarenaviruses (NWMs) are prevalent viral pathogens endemic to South America. Though infection remains largely asymptomatic across their rodent hosts, several NWMs have acquired the capability for human transmission, causing viral hemorrhagic fever with high case mortality rates in their human hosts. NWMs are considered priority A pathogens due to their lethality, the potential for human-to-human transmission, and the absence of FDA-approved therapeutics and treatment options. Though the surface glycoproteins which mediate cellular entry of pathogenic NWMs display low sequence similarity, they all share highly conserved genomic and structural features and target a conserved site on the human transferrin receptor to initiate human infection.
My work aims to explore the functional scope of the NWM glycoprotein to investigate how sequence variation is implicated in their potential for emergent disease in the human population. By mapping the sequence trajectories between pathogenic viral species and evaluating how sequence variation manifests in structural perturbations across the NWM glycoprotein, I will elucidate the mechanisms and factors that contribute to viral entry and infectivity. This work will ultimately yield insight into how viruses undergo sequence adaptation to confer broad infectious properties, and how this knowledge can be exploited to inform the rational design of proteins to predict both future and past natural evolutionary states to inform the development of therapeutics prior to the onset of new epidemics amongst the human population.
