Judah Evangelista, Postdoctoral Scholar in the Schultz (Chemical Physiology Biochemistry, CPB) and Tafesse (Molecular Microbiology and Immunology, MMI) lab, received a Highly Commended Poster award at the recent 30th International Symposium on Hepatitis C virus, Flaviviruses, and related Viruses (HCV-Flavi) taking place in Oxford, UK. The experiments described in his poster, entitled ‘Searching for Zika Virus Host Factors in the Sphingolipid Interactome’, center around identifying the host proteins and lipids that viruses rely on to support productive infection of our cells. This work comes from a collaborative effort between the Schultz (CPB) and Tafesse (MMI) labs employing lipid probes – custom chemically-modified lipids that can be labeled and tracked in living cells – to identify proteins that interact with signaling lipids that are dysregulated in infected cells. In his postdoctoral work, Judah used CRISPR genetic screening in model liver cells to determine which of these proteins may make cells more susceptible or resistant to Zika infection, providing several new leads for defining the cellular pathways involved in infection.
