Page 49 - Hormel Report 2023

to generate COVID-19 vaccines by companies like Johnson & Johnson and Oxford/AstraZeneca. Details of various adenovirus structures provide insights into their immunogenicity and host-factor interactions
(1, 2). In collaboration with Michael Barry’s group at the Mayo Clinic, Rochester, we are involved in the design of new adenoviral vectors and working on ways to shield adenoviruses from immune clearance and retarget them to specific tissues of interest. Further- more, we have plans in place to explore the adenoviral entry and intracellular trafficking mechanisms using cryo-electron tomography (cryo-ET) methods.
We are also involved in establishing various patho- gen-specific knowledgebases to analyze the related data (e.g., sequence, structure, epitopes) and employ machine learning methods to repurpose the currently approved therapeutics and biologics. We have been well known for maintaining the knowledgebase of virus structures and structure-derived properties, namely VIPERdb (https://viperdb.org) (3) for a number of years now it is being accessed from ~140 countries all over the world. We have recently released an easy-to-use virus taxonomy database (https://viperdb.org/vw) (4) that contains information on all the viruses that
have been identified to date and aggregates related information from various other databases at one place. Moreover, the creation of a comprehensive database of all the pathogens from three super kingdoms of Virus- es, Bacteria, and Archaea is underway.
Last but not least, we are using simple plant virus capsids as platforms for displaying foreign epitopes to generate customized vaccines against the pathogens of concern as well as cancers (5). We were awarded a Paint the Town Pink (PTTP) grant in 2023 to generate nanoparticle-based vaccines against HER+ve breast cancers using these technologies.
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Radially color-coded cryo-EM image reconstruc- tion of Human adenovirus 26 (HAdV-D26) virion, ~1000Å in diameter, at 3.4Å resolution. A color gradient from blue to red was used to represent the regions of the density map between the radii 300Å and 500Å, respectively. The projecting antenna like structures correspond to cellular receptor binding fiber molecules of HAdV-D26.
The Reddy laboratory developed and maintains a virus structure database with a global user base of researchers and students from 143 countries. The database’s homepage can be accessed at https://viperdb.org.
PUBLICATION HIGHLIGHT:
• Reddy, V. S., Yu, X. D., & Barry, M. A. (2022). Refined Capsid Structure of Human Adenovirus D26 at 3.4 angstrom Resolution. Viruses-Basel, 14(2), 15.
ORCID iD: 0000-0003-4638-8277