The human respiratory syncytial virus (hRSV) is a negative-sense single-stranded RNA virus that is one of the leading causes of respiratory diseases in children before the age of five. Despite its medical and economic impact, there are no vaccines or antiviral therapies against this virus.

 

Our group is interested in learning how hRSV assembles and exit infected cells. There is data from more than 30 years ago indicting that this virus forms replication centers or “viral factories”. Nonetheless, how assembly occurs and how the assembled nucleoprotein complexes bud from the producer cell are still unknown. To learn about hRSV assembly the Ph.D. student Ignacio Lara Hernández is characterizing the infectious cycle by thin-section TEM. His goal is to do a detailed ultrastructural characterization of the assembly of the “viral factories” and virions, as well as, the budding process. Finally, he is using immunochemistry (gold nanoparticles abound to antibodies) and will characterize protein-protein interactions that are key for virus assembly.

 

This project is done in collaboration with the Medical School at UASLP; Prof. Andreu Comas-Garcia is the co-PI of this project and is done in very close collaboration with Prof. Daniel Noyola Cherpitel, Prof. Sofia Bernal Silva, and M.Sc. Juan Carlos Escalante-Muñoz.