Functional connection between the transcribing bunyaviral polymerase and the translating ribosome

Speaker: Dr Piotr Gerlach, The International Institute of Molecular Mechanisms and Machines Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw

Talk:  Functional connection between the transcribing bunyaviral polymerase and the translating ribosome

Time: 15.11.2024, 9:00 am

Venue: Intercollegiate Faculty of Biotechnology, Abrahama 58, hall 042B

Dr. Piotr Gerlach is heading the Laboratory of Structural Virology at Imol Polish Academy of Sciences. He joined IMol in 2021 within the frame of the FNP-founded ReMedy IRAP. Originally from Warsaw, during his PhD in Dr. Stephen Cusack’s group at EMBL in Grenoble, he succeeded in determining the first atomic structure of a bunyaviral L protein polymerase. Securing an EMBO Long Term Fellowship, he joined Prof. Elena Conti’s lab at the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry in Munich, where he used cryo-EM to study multi-subunit complexes involved in RNA metabolism. Dr. Gerlach’s group at Imol, supported by EMBO IG and NCN SONATA BIS grants, studies how infectious RNA viruses reorganize and exploit cellular translation.

Translation is one of the major sites of the virus-host battlefront. On the one hand, infected cells shut down most of the translation, activating innate immune and integrated stress response pathways at the same time. At the same time, RNA viruses, being unconditionally dependent on cellular protein synthesis machinery, use a range of strategies to reorganize and exploit cellular translation, forcing ribosomes to translate viral mRNA. Dr. Gerlach’s group is particularly interested in bunyaviruses – a large and understudied group of segmented, negative-strand RNA viruses. In his lecture, he will cover functional and structural aspects of the bunyaviral L protein polymerases and he will discuss the preliminary insights into the bunyaviral transcription-translation coupling mechanism.