Nipah virus is an infectious virus with a 40-75% fatality rate, and langya virus is a new virus, discovered in 2022, so little is known about its properties. Nipah virus and langya virus are both henipaviruses with M, V and W proteins. My research uses a method to insert proteins from these viruses into human cells in order to identify how these viral proteins interact with the innate cellular immune response.
Nipah virus (NiV), a member of the henipavirus genus, is an infectious virus in humans which has caused a fatality rate of between 45 and 75% in several outbreaks since the 1990s. In 2022, a new henipavirus called Langya virus (LayV) was discovered. Nipah viruses are able to infect cells and replicate inside of them due to their ability to suppress the organism’s cellular immune response. Usually the detection of a virus sets off a pathway leading to the induction of interferon. Interferon then activates interferon stimulated genes, which help the cell fight back against the virus. The V and W proteins of NiV have been identified as being able to suppress both parts of this pathway. Because LayV is so new, less is known about its interactions with the cellular viral response. The goal of this study was to understand how LayV proteins inhibit the cellular immune response differently than NiV proteins. Plasmids containing DNA for the viral proteins were inserted (transfected) into human cells from the HEK-293 cell line and were activated with sendai virus or interferon. The cells were then lysed, and a luciferase assay was performed to quantify the induction of interferon or interferon stimulated genes. It was found that NiV V and W proteins were able to inhibit both interferon and ISRE much more effectively than LayV V and W proteins did. Different concentrations of genetic material were used in different samples, and at higher concentrations of NiV V and W, the inhibition effect was stronger. However, these results were much less consistent with different amounts of LayV V and W DNA. The main takeaway so far is that there is a key difference in what cellular proteins the LayV V and W proteins are interacting with as compared to the NiV V and W proteins.
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