Please join host Raul Andino in welcoming the next Biochem Basic Science Seminar special guest speaker of the series, Dr. Susan Weiss, Professor and Vice Chair of Microbiology at Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania for her talk titled: "Coronaviruses: History, Biology and Innate Immune Antagonism” via Zoom on Tuesday, December 1, 2020 at 12pm.

 

The seminar will be in two parts. In Part I, I will describe the biology of coronaviruses with an emphasis on the steps in the virus life cycle that are potential targets for antiviral drugs that might be effective against many if not all known and future coronaviruses. In Part II , I will describe the activation and antagonism of double-stranded RNA induced antiviral pathways (interferons, OAS-RNase L, PKR) during infections with betacoronaviruses. I will compare infections with MERS-CoV (lineage c), murine coronavirus (lineage a) and SARS-CoV-2 (lineage b) betacoronaviruses. SARS-CoV is less able to shut down these innate immune pathways than the other betacoronaviruses we have previously studied, correlating with the absence of some host antagonist genes in the SARS-CoV-2 genome.

 

Click here to learn more.