The Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mt. Sinai recently conducted the first PhD Lab Coat Ceremony in New York City. I was honored to be the Keynote Speaker at this event. My address follows. Forty-three years ago this month I was in your shoes. I had just joined …
Lemurs are primates found only on the island of Madagascar and a few small neighboring islands. Some of these animals have endogenous lentiviruses in their genomes. How did these viruses infect the isolated lemurs?
The global withdrawal of the Sabin type 2 poliovirus vaccine is a test of the feasibility of the plan, declared by the World Health Assembly in 1988, to eradicate all polioviruses.
The development of high throughput nucleic acid sequencing tools has rapidly increased the pace of virus discovery in the past 20 years. Yet in that time, while the largest DNA genomes have increased by nearly ten times, the largest known RNA viral genome has only increase in size by a tenth. This situation has now …
Planaria and mollusks yield the biggest RNA virus genomes Read More »
The membranes of enveloped viruses contain embedded proteins that are essential for attaching to cell receptors and fusing with cell membranes. We generally view these glycoproteins as evenly distributed over the surface of the virus particle, as illustrated for influenza virus. But many more envelope glycoproteins are involved in attachment and entry of larger viruses, …
Viral glycoproteins are not always randomly distributed Read More »
What do you call a small bacterium that acts like a virus, infecting and lysing eukaryotic cells? Chromulinavvorax destructans, of course! As part of a study to identify pathogens that infect protist zooplankton, particles smaller than 0.8 microns were obtained from freshwater habitats in southwestern British Columbia, and used to infect cultures of protists.
