Session 1C: Inaugural Lectures by Fellows/Associates

Manju Bansal, IISc

3D Snapshots into Virus Life Cycles Using Cryo-electron Tomography and Sub-Tomogram Averaging

The need to understand how pathogenic viruses cause cellular infection has never been more amplified as in today’s pandemic-affected world. The fundamental approaches to building better therapeutic strategies encompass characterizing the viral immune landscape and mechanisms by which these viruses gain host cell entry and developing ways to inhibit it. The challenge of examining heterogenous and dynamic events in viral life cycles under conditions that are amenable for high-resolution structural analysis can now be circumvented using cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) methods. The near-atomic resolution structures of protein complexes in solutions can be achieved using the single-particle cryo- EM. Using cryo-electron tomography (cryo-ET) and sub-tomogram averaging (STA), we can go further and reduce our dependence on purified, homogenous biological samples. In this talk, applications of cryo-EM and cryo-ET to study complex virus systems will be discussed. The broadening spectrum of questions that can be answered using high-resolution cryo-EM and cryo-ET studies can add not only new dimensions to our understanding and assumptions about enveloped virus infections but also have broad relevance to other fundamental biological processes such as cell-to-cell fusion, synaptic vesicle signalling and membrane protein function.