Herpesviruses are well known masters of immune evasion. During my PhD, I studied immune evasion strategies used by pseudorabies virus, an alphaherpesvirus in pigs. My major interest here is to study immune evasion strategies used by equine herpesvirus type 1 (EHV-1), also an alphaherpesvirus and a major pathogen of horses. Recently, glycoprotein G (gG) of EHV-1 has been described to bind to several chemokines. By setting up several in vitro chemotaxis assays, I want to investigate if gG binding to chemokines interferes with the normal chemotaxis of equine leukocytes and as such may play a role in viral immune modulation during EHV-1 pathogenesis.

Besides, I’m also interested in having a closer look at the interaction between EHV-1 and integrins. Integrins are adhesion receptors which mediate cell-cell, cell-extracellular and cell-pathogen interaction. Binding of integrins to their ligands basically occurs through conserved binding motifs. Preliminary experiments demonstrated that activation and/or inhibition of integrins has an effect on the susceptibility of cells to infection with EHV-1. Since several glycoproteins of EHV-1 contain integrin-binding motifs, it is my goal to generate recombinant viruses harboring point mutations in the binding motifs of the various viral proteins and to study the effect of the mutations on infectivity in vitro. If a clear effect is observed, the next step will be to test virulence of the generated mutant viruses in vivo.

Contact

email: gv34@cornell.edu