NIH VideoCast - NIH-FDA COVID 19 Lecture Series: Studying Coronavirus Cell Entry with Functional Viromics by Michael Letko, PhD

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NIH-FDA COVID 19 Lecture Series: Studying Coronavirus Cell Entry with Functional Viromics by Michael Letko, PhD

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Air date:	Thursday, November 14, 2024, 12:00:00 PM Time displayed is Eastern Time, Washington DC Local
Views:	Total views: 166 (109 Live, 57 On-demand)
Category:	COVID-19
Runtime:	01:00:36
Closed captioning:	Check box to display CC outside of the video Note: You can drag the captioning window around and resize it
Description:	The COVID-19 Scientific Interest Group (SIG) lecture series was initiated in 2020 to facilitate communication of the ongoing scientific research to understand SARS-CoV-2 and treat COVID-19. Invited speakers share the latest research on a broad range of topics, including clinical findings, therapeutics, basic biology, epidemiology, and public health research. This lecture series runs from September through June, and occurs biweekly on Thursdays at noon. Dr. Michael Letko is a molecular virologist studying the mechanisms underlying viral zoonosis. Dr. Letko received his PhD. from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York where he completed his thesis on viral-host co-evolution in lentiviruses and restriction factors. During his post-doctoral fellowship at the NIH’s Rocky Mountain Laboratory campus in Montana, Dr. Letko gained an appreciation for bat-borne emerging infectious diseases and focused his research primarily on coronaviruses. Today, Dr. Letko’s laboratory of functional viromics combines synthetic biology and molecular engineering to assess if and how uncharacterized viruses from the ever-growing virome can infect human cells. His lab is building new tools to explore and study a range of emerging viruses from orthohantavirus to coronavirus across a wide breadth of host reservoir species and in vitro model systems. LECTURE SUMMARY: While our understanding of viruses circulating in wildlife around the globe is ever expanding at the sequence level, our understanding of these viruses in the laboratory is far more limited. Therefore, we do not know if most newly discovered viruses are capable of transmitting to humans or domestic animals. Since 2016, my research has primarily been focused on the betacoronaviruses that include MERS-CoV, SARS-CoV and SARS-CoV-2. In 2020, I developed a platform to characterize receptor preference and cell entry of the entire subgenus of sarbecoviruses, which includes SARS-CoV-2. This work showed that many of these related viruses are also capable of infecting human cells, and the platform was used to rapidly demonstrate the receptor for SARS- CoV-2 just 12 days after the virus genome was published. Currently, my lab has expanded on this work to the merbecoviruses, which will be the subject of this presentation. I will show our data on cell entry and receptor tropism for the entire merbecovirus subgenus and provide an in-depth look at the receptor use for the HKU5 complex of coronaviruses. This group of merbecoviruses was discovered 18 years ago but its receptor has remained elusive until now. I will end the presentation with our latest results with the HKU5 coronaviruses that were recently identified in deceased mink on fur farms in China.

Author:	https://www.niaid.nih.gov/research/covid-19-sig-lecture-series

CIT Live ID:	55222
Permanent link:	https://videocast.nih.gov/watch=55222

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