News

So much happened this summer and all so quickly.
–Megan Westrick, an undergraduate, joined the lab. She received funding from IU Advanced Summer Research Program and the Department of Chemistry. She got A LOT of good data for her poster.
–Jon graduated with his MS in Biotechnology. He is currently working in Jay Lennon’s lab at IU.
–Ben is headed north to University of Michigan where he is joining the PIBS (Program in Biomedical Sciences) PhD program.
–We worked with the Jim Holland Summer Program. Nine rising high school seniors had 1.5 days of hands-on virology. Absolute blast!!
–Wes and Tuli attended ASV, Wes presented!
–Tuli became an editor for Mini Reviews and GEMS with Journal of Virology. Contact her if you have ideas or want to read about something in particular.

Pictures are coming but until they do, check out @TuliLab to see all these cool things.

Congrats to Erin, new member of Phi Beta Kappa!

Kudos to Jon Gomez for doing a great job at the Biotech Poster Session.
First of hopefully many poster presentations.

Ciara Richardson, a Biochemistry graduate student, joined the lab. Learn more about her on our “People” page. Excited to have her on board.

Congratulations to Haley for defending her thesis and dissertation work. Haley was a joint student with Schlebach and Mukhopadhyay lab and initiated the work on alphavirus PRF, structural protein topology, and regulators of PRF in alphaviruses. She defended on September 1, or Back to Hogwarts Day. Of course the two labs planned a Harry Potter themed celebration!

Viruses are magical….we know that. One mechanism they use to increase their coding potential is programmed ribosomal frameshifting. Check out our perspective on how as a field we need to rethink how we identify frameshifting elements and determine cis and trans factors that are necessary to regulate programmed frameshifting, especially during viral infections.

Also this month, Wes became a true virologist. He gave a short talk at ASV in the Togavirus section. Welcome to the club, Wes.

Ben Pockrass graduated with a BS in Biochem and has stayed on to work as a research associate in the lab. He’s our cloning guru and hopes to gain more lab experience before heading to grad school Fall 2023.

Not sure why we weren’t better about updating the webpage last semester, you’d think being on sabbatical I’d be on top of things.

Where to start?

October: I visited Wendy Maury at University of Iowa. We brainstormed about experiments and I did my first (and probably last for a while) animal experiment.

December: Julie Button is now Julie Button, PhD!!!! She defended in December, and her family was able to come out for the defense. What a way to end 2021!

December: Allison Houghton, a microbiology grad student, joined the lab. We are excited to have her on board. She’ll have a personal blurb up soon in the people section.

January: Sophia, Shefah, Brian, and Joe had their paper on inter-dimer spike contacts accepted to Journal of Virology. Sophia and Brian’s first paper!

We have been fortunate to have a long-standing collaboration with the Weaver lab at UTMB. Our latest work, “Lineage Divergence and Vector-Specific Adaptation Have Driven Chikungunya Virus onto Multiple Adaptive Landscapes,” has been accepted in mBio.

Julie’s paper  “Capsid-E2 interactions rescue core assembly in viruses that cannot form cytoplasmic nucleocapsid cores” has been accepted to Journal of Virology. Exciting times.

**Quick update: Julie’s paper was selected to be in “Spotlight,” a feature that highlights articles of significant interest. The first for the lab.

Kat Jones has joined the lab! She is working with Haley on frameshifting reporters. Welcome, Kat.

Had our first IN-PERSON lab outing. Outside lunch on a sunny day.

Lunch out sans Wes (he was literally doing a series of transfection optimizations). Weird to be out but happy we could. Nice way to say “Congrats” to our graduates and “Welcome” to new lab member Gayani.

Gayani is a first year graduate student in the Biochemistry program. She decided to join our lab and we couldn’t be happier. We will update our People page with her pic and bio shortly.

Congrats to Kailah! She had her senior piano recital (had zoom link if interested), finished the semester, and is off to IU School of Medicine. We will miss having her but luckily her family is in Bloomington so higher chance of her stopping by to say HI!

Sophia received the Departmental Undergraduate Research Award and the University’s Kate Hevner Mueller Senior Class Award! Hard to believe four years have gone by….but when you see all the data, you believe it.

Ended 2020 with a bang, Wes signing on to help with our collaborative project with BASF.

Tuli was one of seven IU faculty named an AAAS Fellow. See complete list here. Another reason to have cake with the lab!

Julie’s paper on replacing the nucleic acid requirement for in vitro assembly of core-like particles has been accepted. Highlights: we can make a cargo-free CLP using a combination of WT and mutant capsid proteins. If you decide to add cargo to the mix, the order of addition of the components decides their stoichiometry in the assembled particle.

A review by Julie and Shefah, with collaborator Joe Wang, has been accepted. We discuss the new advances in alphavirus assembly and structure in Current Opinion in Virology.  Keep your eyes pealed for the review!

Sophia received the L.S. McClung Scholarship for the 2020-2021 academic year. Congrats to her, great she will continue working in the lab her senior year.