manzanomaa88@univie.ac.at

Today, the group was thrilled to see its first Master student, Lotte, successfully defend her thesis! From her time as an undergrad student to her Master’s work, Lotte has worked hard developing methods to study the viral factory of Nucleocytoviricota. Her hard work has paid of and she now finishes her master with two works (currently) available! This moment constituted a milestone for the group and of course a proud PI moment.

Congratulations Lotte!

Here below, some of her own, and collaborative work:

Mimivirus transcription and translation occur at well-defined locations within amoeba host cells. Journal of Virology, 99(7):e00554-25. https://doi.org/10.1128/jvi.00554-25

Giant virus creates subcellular environment to overcome codon– tRNA mismatch. bioRxiv, https://doi.org/10.1101/2024.10.07.616867

We sequenced high-quality genomes of protists known as hosts of giant viruses (GVs). Matching of codon usage preferences is often used to predict virus-host pairs. Our analyses revealed that in GVs, codon usage alone is a poor predictor of known pairs. Why? well, GVs have complex genomes… They encode few to complete tRNA sets and even genes from the translational machinery (e.g. tRNA–ligases). The host immune system may also play a role, driving viral codon usage away from its own. Moreover, its replication site (nuclear vs. cytoplasmatic) could also play a role. Finally, by analyzing the new amoebal genomes, we discovered viral integrations (potentially from GVs) into some of them, indicating historical infections. Most notably some inserted major capsid proteins seem to potentially encode for intact proteins (work in progress)…

Reference: 10.1101/2024.09.23.614596
*Version of record: 10.1093/gbe/evae271