The Laboratory for Quantitative and Synthetic Virology
Our lab is interested in understanding the fundamental principles of gene regulatory circuits and how viral 'master circuits' exploit these principles to control virus replication. Ultimately, our goal is to exploit these circuitry principles to engineer the next generation of antiviral therapies.
The lab employs a coupled computational experimental approach that relies on quantitative time-lapse fluorescence microscopy with mathematical modeling to study viral gene expression circuits and expression 'noise' at the single-cell level.
A 12-hour microscopy movie of human T cells infected with an HIV virus engineered to express red and green fluorescent proteins at different stages of infection. These movies enable us to analyze viral circuitry to identify weak points that can be exploited by novel therapies.
"Transcriptional burst frequency and burst size are equally modulated across the human genome."
"Dynamics of protein noise can distinguish between alternate sources of gene-expression variability."
"Lentiviral vectors to study stochastic noise in gene expression."
"Accelerated immunodeficiency by anti-CCR5 treatment in HIV infection."
