Ichiro Misumi (Assistant Professor, Genetics) has received the UNC Junior Faculty Development Award from the Committee on Faculty Research and Scholarly Leaves for his project titled “Using single-cell RNA sequencing to explore host immunity to HAV”.
The proposed work promises to provide a unique tool for studying the immune response to hepatitis A virus (HAV). He anticipates that this study will reveal functional importance of IFN signaling in HAV replication, liver injury, and immune responses at early time point of the infection. He may find that IFN expression in infected Ifnar1rHep mice improves NK- and T- cell responses, contributes to HAV control, and does not cause hepatic cell death because apoptosis and inflammatory responses in hepatocytes are caused by MAVS-IRF3-dependent signaling but not IFN dependent. These data will also be relevant to other hepatotropic viral pathogenesis such as HEV.