DATE:

Friday, February 11, 2022

TIME:

3:30 PM

LOCATION:

GMCS 314

SPEAKER:

Dr. Antoni Luque, Mathematics and Statistics, San Diego State University

ABSTRACT:

Viruses are the most abundant biological entity on Earth and play a pivotal role in regulating the evolution of organisms and the planet’s biogeochemistry. Most viruses protect their genome in icosahedral shells made of multiple copies of the same protein.Viral icosahedral shells span two orders of magnitude in size and thousands of different architectures. Yet, the physical mechanisms that have selected such diverse viral structures are unknown. Here, I will share my lab’s most recent contributions to this fundamental problem. First, I will introduce the generalized quasi-equivalence theory of icosahedral architectures as a framework to investigate systematically viral architectures and their protein components. Second, I will show how the physical relationship between the protein shell and genome of viruses has opened the door to characterize uncultured viruses, predict the existence of unknown viruses, and engineer new viruses from the environment. Finally, I will discuss a novel physical mechanism that may hold the key to how viruses explore different viral architectures.

Bio: Dr. Luque is an Associate Professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at San Diego State University (SDSU). His expertise is in theoretical and computational biophysics, and his research interest is at the interface of physical virology and viral ecology and evolution. He received his Ph.D. in physics from the Universitat of Barcelona in 2011 for his study on the structural, mechanical, and self-assembly properties of viruses. His postdoctoral training was at New York University, where he investigated chromatin using multiscale protein-DNA computational models. He became a faculty at SDSU in 2015, where he joined the interdisciplinary Viral Information Institute and the Computational Science Research Center. Dr. Luque has made significant contributions to the fields of physical virology, viral ecology, and chromatin, including new theoretical frameworks to investigate icosahedral and elongated viruses as well as the life cycle of viruses of microbes based on the physical properties of microbial communities. His interdisciplinary work has resulted in high-impact publications, including Nature, Nature Communications, PNAS, Physical Review Letters, and Nucleic Acids Research. Dr.Luque is the first faculty at SDSU to have received the California Faculty Innovation and Leadership Award. His research is currently funded by the National Science Foundation and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.

Presenter Website

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HOST:

Parag Katira

VIDEO: