Understanding enterovirus maturation

Start date: 1 March 2022
End date: 28 February 2027
Funder: National Institute of Health (NIH)
Partners and collaborators: Professor David Rowlands
Primary investigator: Professor Nicola Stonehouse
Co-investigators: Dr Martin McPhillie (School of Chemistry)
External co-investigators: Professor Steve Polyak (University of Washington)
Postgraduate students: Pippa Hall

Project title

Description

Project background

Enteroviruses (EVs) are responsible for a number of diseases that affect humans and animals. This project is focussed on understanding the fundamental mechanism of how the virus particles assemble.

Research overview

EVs assemble into icosahedral symmetric particles, which are composed of 60 repeating copies of three structural proteins, VP0, VP3 and VP1. Upon packaging of the genome, the VP0 precursor is rapidly processed into VP4 and VP2.

This process is essential to viral infectivity and therefore mutant viruses which do not undergo VP0 cleavage remain non-infectious.

Applying a combination of approaches, we are attempting to trap intermediates in the viral assembly and maturation pathway to characterise these structurally and biochemically in order to better understand the conformational changes which ultimately result in EV maturation.