New Paper on cellular effects of persistent expression of viral nucleic acids

In this collaborative project, Chris and Hendrik found that long-term delivery of RIG-I ligand leads to cytostasis. Surprisingly, unlike found for other innate immune stimuli (e.g. LPS) persistent activation of the RIG-I pathway does not lead to tolerance. We hypothesize that this system recapitulates the situation in HCV-infected livers, which requires constant re-infection of cells in order to persistently propagate the virus. A beautiful story – which you can read here.

Christian Urban

Meet our new instrument — incucyte S3!

incucyte_cover
Fully automated live-cell imaging microscope. Measures 3 channels of up to six 96-well plates over multiple days.
A time lapse of VSV-GFP (MOI 10) infected HeLa cells.
Mass spectrometry based analyses typically lead to identification of hundreds of candidate proteins with potential to be involved in diverse virus-related processes. The incucyte S3 live cell imaging system allows to monitor up to 584 parallel conditions in a time-resolved and single-cell manner and – for instance – delivers accurate virus growth rates over time for these individual conditions. This enables us to conduct arrayed knockdown, knockout, overexpression or drug screens to link functional consequences to identified candidate proteins. For us, this is a life-transforming experience – we’re looking forward to many exciting experiments and lots of terabytes of images to crunch!

Antiviral Network of Proteins published in Nature Immunology

Protein-Protein Interaction Netwrok of Interferon Stimulated Genes

Congratulations to Philipp Hubel and co-authors – our work on the innate immune network got published in Nature Immunology!

The body’s defense strategies against viral infections are as diverse as the attacks themselves. We conducted a survey to systematically investigate the interactions of interferon-stimulated genes (ISGs), which are at the center of coordinating the antiviral immune response. Through integrating data obtained by affinity purification followed by mass spectrometry (AP/MS), published datasets and functional validation experiments, we found many unknown interactions of ISGs, which sheds light on the overall organization of the innate immune system.

Have a look at the paper: “A protein-interaction network of interferon-stimulated genes extends the innate immune system landscape”