Tag: BRENNASALADIN

Live Blogger: Brenna Saladin
Editors: Varsha Shankar and Ryan Schildcrout

This piece was written live during the 8th annual RNA Symposium, “Unmasking the Power of RNA: From Structure to Medicine” hosted by the University of Michigan’s Center for RNA Biomedicine. Follow MiSciWriters’ coverage of this event on Twitter with the hashtag #umichrna.

Viruses are a routine occurrence in everyday life. The common cold, the flu, and most recently the COVID-19 pandemic has kept viruses at the forefront of the public mind. One of the key aspects of the viral life cycle and infectious mechanism is the fact that they rely on the host in order to replicate and spread infection. Viruses do not contain their own machinery for replication, but rather they hijack host cell machinery to do their bidding. Our speaker today studies one of the beginning steps of this process: reverse transcription initiation. This is the process by which the retroviruses, such as human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), create the DNA template from viral RNA that encodes the necessary components for infection and proliferation in host cells. The D’ Souza lab studies these processes so that we have a better understanding of the mechanisms of viral infection, and therefore the potential to create drugs to combat them.