Back to the lab after a week of really great research on virus evolution in Roscoff! The VEE team was represented by Anouk, Laura, Dani, and Dominik. Got to make new contacts, hear about great science, and interact with many great people… and yes seafood was delicious! (Im)patiently waiting for the next edition of this great meeting!
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
Faruk joined earlier in July the VEE team as a Master student (after a 2-month internship). He will work on exploring competition and fitness among giant viruses. Welcome Faruk!
How often do you get to attend a conference in a castle? This beautiful and unique location made the conference very special. We got to meet a large part of the giant virus community, had great scientific exchanges, started new collaborations, and enjoyed the snow. Thanks to the organisers the conference was a great success!
On September 4 and 5 we attended a conference on Extracellular Vesicles (EVs) at the Medical University of Graz. This conference was a joint meeting of the Austrian, Hungarian, Slovenian en Serbian societies/networks for EVs. Our research group is completely new to the field of EVs and our main goal was to learn as much as possible about methods and novel approaches. PhD student Laura presented a poster on her first approach in understanding the differences between EVs produced by infected versus uninfected cells. We definetly learned a lot and made good connections with the EV community. Currently, most methods target EVs produced by mammalian cells, which unfortunately does not always work for our amoeba cells. So we definitely need to become creative and setup novel protocols for working with our favorite model system.
From left to right: Laura, Lotte, Dani, Anouk.
Happy to present to you the new Virus Ecology and Evolution team at the Division of Microbial Ecology (DOME). We are looking into the many different ways viruses can interact with their environment and how this affects viral evolution.
Virus Ecology and Evolution (VEE)