Reid Roberts, a graduate student in Jenny Ting’s lab, is one of the winners of the 2013 Impact Awards. The Impact Awards recognize outstanding graduate students in a wide variety of research areas and are privately funded each year through the Graduate Education Advancement Board. On April 10, 2013, Reid presented his doctoral research and … Read more

On March 28, 2013, PLoS Pathogens online featured work from Victor Garcia’s lab, using humanized (“BLT”) mice to demonstrate the role of HIV’s vif gene in counteracting host restriction of viral replication. Access the original article, “HIV Restriction by APOBEC3 in Humanized Mice,” through PubMed and the UNC News story here.

Published March 31, 2013 in Nature Advance Online: Stan Lemon’s lab shows how a “non-enveloped” picornavirus (hepatitis A virus) can become cloaked in host-derived membranes, providing protection from antibody-mediated neutralization. Access the online article through PubMed. See the UNC News story on this article.

  A major News Focus article in the March 15th edition of Science recalls the first pandemic of the 21st century and features comments by M&I Professor Ralph Baric. See PubMed to access the article.

In March, 2013, three UNC SoM M&I faculty members were elected as 2013 Fellows of the American Academy of Microbiology (AAM), the honorific leadership group within the American Society for Microbiology (ASM). Selection for fellowship is a highly competitive annual peer review process, based on scientific achievement and original contributions that have advanced the field … Read more

PNAS featured an article from Matt Redinbo’s group, and the focus is on the role of a relaxase encoded on an antibiotic resistance plasmid in S. aureus. The authors identify structural features important in conjugation and discuss the implications for how drug resistance is transferred between bacteria. Get the article through PubMed link below. Molecular … Read more

. . . for studying KSHV-B cell persistence, hyperplasia, and lymphoma. Hoon Sin and Dirk Dittmer constructed a transgenic mouse that expresses the complete complement of core KSHV latent genes under control of a B cell-specific promoter, creating the first in vivo model that allows functional assessment of the viral micro RNAs. Visit PubMed to … Read more

In the February 13 issue of Cell Host & Microbe, Blossom Damania’s group uses a cellular kinome siRNA screen and other knockdown experiments to prove that TLKs are involved in control of gammaherpesvirus latency. See the UNC News article here.

The Lemon lab paper, “Competing and noncompeting activities of miR-122 and the 5′ exonuclease Xrn1 in regulation of hepatitis C virus replication,” was published in the December 17 PNAS Early Edition. Access the paper in PubMed. See the UNC News story, “UNC researchers discover how hepatitis C virus reprograms human liver cells.”

In the 2/22/2013 issue of Science, Ed Miao‘s group demonstrates a protective role for caspase-11 in responding to intracellular bacteria that escape the phagosome. See the UNC News article here. Dr. Miao’s paper was recently featured in a “Research Highlight” article in Nature Reviews Microbiology. And Cell Host & Microbe (Volume 13, Issue 3, 13 … Read more