Glyphosate, the world’s most used herbicide, is a potent antimicrobial and a metal chelator that may select for resistance in animal pathogens. In our previous work, we obtained a Salmonella enterica serovar Typhimurium mutant resistant to a glyphosate-containing herbicide Roundup (Pöppe et al., 2020), which had a mutation in the bacterial stress response regulator rpoS that controls...
Evolution of influenza A virus (IAV) in animal hosts and particularly reassortment between different strains are two key factors involved in the generation of pandemic viruses. Particularly the “Swine flu” (Pdm-2009) spread worldwide and was introduced into the European swine population where it started to generate a variety of reassortants of unknown zoonotic risk for humans.
We established...
A peculiar feature of the hepatitis E virus (HEV) is its reliance on endosomes for its release. This route, mediated by MVBs, can be targeted by drugs, yet little is known about viral replication. The latter is mediated via the viral polyprotein pORF1 comprising seven domains. Neither its putative proteolytical processing nor its subcellular localization is fully clarified. Here, we aim to...
Cryo-electron microscopy approaches provide critical tools to inform on virus structure and mechanistic understanding of infection for vaccine development and drug design and hence facilitate pandemic preparedness. We have established a cryo-electron tomography (cryo-ET) workflow which we applied to study SARS-CoV-2, influenza A virus (IAV) and Ebola virus (EBOV) infected cells at molecular...
The order Bunyavirales includes many arboviruses as well as insect-specific viruses (ISVs). ISVs naturally infect mosquitoes but in contrast to arboviruses, they cannot infect vertebrates. ISVs have gained significant attention in recent years because of their ability to interfere with arbovirus infection and, thereby, their potential use in the prevention of disease spread by insects....
Influenza-A-viruses (IAV) may cause flu affecting the respiratory tract of humans, poultry and pigs. Co-infections with pathogenic lung bacteria are common and contribute to the severity of disease progression. Neutrophils are recruited to the site of infection where they can release neutrophil extracellular traps (NETs) to counteract invading pathogens. NETs consist of a DNA backbone spiked...
