Project Director: Mark McGuire Project Team: Janet Williams, Sarah Brooker, Chris Remien, Ben Ridenhour, JT Van Leuven Myriad microbial communities within and on the human body interact constantly with each other and environmental factors, and although much work has focused on characterizing these various community structures (especially in adults), almost nothing is known about how…
Project Team: Alex Vakanski (PI), Stephen Lee, Jake Ferguson The current methods in the literature for representing human motions are based on modeling the movements at a single level of abstraction, either at a low-level (i.e., trajectory level) of abstraction or at the high-level (i.e., symbolic level) of abstraction. The proposed project will exploit the latest advances in…
Project Team: Deborah Stenkamp (PI), Diana Mitchell, Robert Mackin, Jagdish Patel Gene replication is an established mechanism for the generation of raw genetic material upon which evolution may act. For example, tandem replication of genes to generate arrays of paralogs underlies functional diversification in vertebrate sensory systems. Tandem replication of opsin (visual pigment) genes and subsequent neofunctionalization provide…
Project Team: Paul Rowley (PI), Jagdish Patel The interaction of host proteins with lentiviruses and other retroviruses and retrotransposons represents a major research theme of the Rowley lab. The proposed work fits well with the mission of the NIH and is a field of study that has traditionally been well supported. Dr. Rowley is fully…
Project Team: Berna Devezer (PI), Erkan Buzbas, Gustavo Nardin Reproducibility of scientific findings has long been considered a pillar of science. However, in the last decade, many disciplines life sciences have failed to reproduce major research findings. This reproducibility crisis has triggered a shift to revise current research practices. Examples include how to make biomedical findings more reproducible…
Project Director: Bert Baumgaertner Project Team: Joseph DeAguero How pathogens spread through a population can be complicated by a number of factors. One of them is pathogen interaction during co-infection. Here infection by one pathogen can change host susceptibility to a second, or being co-infected can change a host’s infectivity compared to a singly infected…
Project Director: Christine Parent Project Team: Tanya Miura, Jake Ferguson, Andrea Gonzalez-Gonzalez, Jagdish Patel, JT Van Leuven, Ashley DeAguero With the increasing global mobility of human populations, individuals are being exposed to an increasing diversity of viruses. Many approaches are used to study viral coinfections at different organizational levels, ranging from very detailed molecular studies…
Project Director: Tanya Miura Project Team: Craig Miller, Onesmo Balemba, Jake Ferguson, Jagdish Patel, JT Van Leuven, Andres Gonzalez Viral infections in the lower respiratory tract cause severe disease and are responsible for a majority of pediatric hospitalizations, approximately 20% of which are infected by more than one viral pathogen. Clinical data indicate that disease severity…
Project Team: Marty Ytreberg (PI), Celeste Brown (Co-PI), Craig Miller (Co-PI), Holly Wichman, Tanya Miura, Chris Mirabzadeh, Kyle Martin Ebola surface glycoprotein (blue) bound by antibodies (brown). In dark blue are other known epitopes (antibody binding sites). In orange and red are mutations from the recent epidemic in West Africa. The goal of this project,…
Project Team: Christopher Marx (PI), Andreas Vasdekis (Co-PI), Chris Remien, Siavash Riazi, Denis Liyu Multidrug antibiotic persistence, which allows some cells that lack genetic resistance to survive antibiotic stresses by becoming dormant, is a major public health concern. This exploratory project will use data from state-of-the-art image cytometry and single-cell analysis in combination with mechanistic mathematical…