Virology in the dark: understanding how influenza viruses spread and interact within their host

Supervisors:

Prof Ed Hutchinson, School of Infection & Immunity
Dr Ed Roberts, School of Cancer Sciences

Summary:

What happens to a virus once it’s inside you?

Understanding how viruses colonise multicellular hosts is central to our understanding of virus replication, pathogenesis, and evolution. We have good experimental and computational methods to study how viruses replicate in individual cells, but until now it has been very hard to look inside a complex multicellular host and examine the microscale ecology of virus replication.

This project will look inside the ‘black box’ of an infected organ and examine how influenza viruses spread within their host. You will use recently-developed light microscopy methods to study influenza virus infection in unprecedented detail, combining in vitro and in vivo experimental models with mathematical models to examine the causes of viral pathogenesis and antiviral immunity as they play out across the surfaces of an organ within an infected host. In doing so, you will provide a new perspective on how this major viral pathogen evolves to evade immune responses and generate new pandemics, and improve our understanding of how this disease can be diagnosed and controlled.