We are proud to announce that Yara has been successful at extending her postdoc fellowship with support from the Wenner-Gren foundations.
In our lab, Yara has been developing a methodology to track individual virus particles as they land on the surface of living cells. This allows her to resolve the very initial steps of virus-membrane interactions. The method has been successfully implemented to study the initial interaction of herpes simplex viruses (HSV) with glycosaminoglycans, sulfated sugar molecules found on the cell surface. A manuscript reporting on this work is currently under consideration for publication.
For the rest of her stay, Yara will fully capitalize on the method she has established, and implement it to a number of projects in collaboration with other groups. For example, she has initiated a collaboration with the group of of Niklas Arnberg (Clinical Microbiology, Umeå University) where she tracks adeno and cocksackieviruses as they bind to living cells. She is also currently finalizing some work she did together with Gisa Gerold (Twincore, Centre for Experimental and Clinical Infection Research, Hannover, Germany) while she visited her lab in Hannover, tracking Chikungunya viruses in their BSL-3 facility.
In addition to this, Yara is planning on complementing her HSV data with some single molecule force spectroscopy studies using optical tweezers, in collaboration with Magnus Andersson (Department of Physics, Umeå University) and another postdoc in our lab. This will allow her to better understand the molecular mechanisms modulating the diffusive behavior of herpes simplex viruses at the cell surface.
We are certainly very happy that Yara will stay with us for a bit longer!