Project description
Studying zoonotic viral threats
Wild animal viruses are a real threat to public health, as demonstrated by Ebola outbreaks and the COVID-19 pandemic. However, little is known about how these viruses function. The EU-funded EVADER project will investigate viral emergence from an evolutionary standpoint. By studying how host range mutants appear and adapt to human cells, it will deliver the most comprehensive landscape of viral human cell infectivity to date. The project will also study the receptor-dependent cell tropism of enveloped RNA viruses – an experimentally tractable process involved in viral emergence. Finally, it will provide important clues about the role of spontaneous mutation in viral emergence and explore the feasibility of clade-level antiviral therapies.
Objective
The emergence of new human pathogenic viruses from animal reservoirs is an increasing concern, but also a poorly understood process. Massive sequencing programs have been recently launched to characterize wildlife viruses, but empirical information on how these viruses function and whether they can potentially infect humans is needed. However, the isolation and culturing of wildlife viruses is too often unfeasible due to technical issues, biosafety concerns, or lack of full-length sequence information. Furthermore, we need to investigate viral emergence from an evolutionary standpoint to better understand how host-range mutants appear and adapt to human cells. To achieve these goals, we will focus on the receptor-dependent cell tropism of enveloped RNA viruses, a central and experimentally tractable process involved in viral emergence. First, we will use high-throughput gene synthesis to create hundreds of pseudoviruses coated with the envelopes of previously uncharacterized wildlife viruses belonging to different families, and we will examine their ability to infect a panel of humans cells from various tissues. This will deliver the most comprehensive landscape of viral human cell infectivity to date. Second, we will use experimental evolution, massive parallel sequencing, and site-directed mutagenesis to explore how viral envelopes diversify, undergo cell tropism shifts, and adapt to human cells. This will provide important clues about the role of spontaneous mutation in viral emergence, and may reveal repeatable evolutionary pathways that could help us improve outbreak predictability. Finally, we will use our experimental results to infer candidate cell receptors for wildlife viruses using machine learning, and to explore the feasibility of broad-range, clade-level antiviral therapies that could be used for combating emerging viruses in the future.
Fields of science
- medical and health scienceshealth sciencesinfectious diseasesRNA viruses
- natural sciencesbiological sciencesmicrobiologyvirology
- natural sciencesbiological sciencesgeneticsmutation
- natural sciencesbiological sciencesgeneticsRNA
- natural sciencescomputer and information sciencesartificial intelligencemachine learning
Programme(s)
Topic(s)
Funding Scheme
ERC-ADG - Advanced GrantHost institution
46010 Valencia
Spain