e-mail address: email@example.com
Christiane Wobus, PhD
Human norovirus is the leading cause of food borne illness, however little is known about the infectivity about the virus due to the difficulty researchers have had in replicating the virus in tissue culture and in a small animal model. The Wobus lab has developed the first small animal model of the virus and my work over the summer will be utilizing this model primarily. I will be determining the role of various immune cells in the control of human norovirus such as natural killer cells and T and B cells. I will also be examining the role of innate immune mediators in controlling human norovirus infectivity and determining what cell types are responsible for secreting these mediators.
Additionally I will be working to characterize what mutations make it possible for some viral isolates to infect our mouse model strain and not others. To achieve this I will be utilizing several viral isolates sent to us from the CDC to test for infectivity in our mouse model. Complementary to that I will begin to develop a mouse-adapted human norovirus strain. I will then sequence both the mouse-adapted strain and the viral isolates in order to determine which genes allow for the infectivity of our mouse strain.
Smith CJ, Turula H, Snyder CM. Systemic Hematogenous Maintenance of Memory Inflation by MCMV Infection. (2014) PLoS Pathog. 2014 Jul 3;10(7):e1004233. doi: 10.1371/journal.ppat.1004233.
Turula, H, Smith, CJ, Grey, F, Zurbach, KA and Snyder, CM. Competition between T cells maintains clonal dominance during memory inflation induced by MCMV. (2013) Eur. J. Immunol.. doi: 10.1002/eji.201242940
Doom, CM, Turula H, Hill AB. Investigation of the impact of the common animal facility contaminant murine norovirus on experimental murine cytomegalovirus infection. (2009) Virology, doi:10.1016/j.virol.2009.05.035
Turula, H, et al., An OT-1 adoptive transfer model reveals wide host-to-host variability in the inflation of a single T cell clone and interclonal competition during MCMV infection. Poster. Keystone Symposium on Molecular and Cellular Biology: Viral Immunity. 2012.
Turula, H, et al., Transgenic T cells stimulated by MCMV encoded antigen are rejected from congenic hosts after acute clonal expansion. Philadelphia Infection and Immunity Forum, ASM, 2011
Rackham Merit Fellowship, 2013