Page 41 - The Hormel Institute 2024 Annual Report

Our group’s research interests include investigating the structural and architec- tural characteristics of viral pathogens at
the molecular level. Additionally, we are interest- ed in characterizing various stages of their life cycles (e.g., cell entry, trafficking, nuclear entry, etc.).
The insights gained from these studies can
be used to transform viruses into useful tools (vectors) in medicine, modifying them as needed for gene and vaccine delivery. In this regard, we are particularly interested in studying human adenoviruses, which are used as viral vectors for engineering and delivery of vaccines against other pathogens (e.g., SARS-CoV-2, HIV, etc.). Among the different types of SARS-CoV-2 vac- cines created during the COVID-19 pandemic, the adenovirus-vectored vaccines (e.g., Astra- Zeneca, J&J, and vaccines developed in China and Russia) were administered to protect the majority (>70%) of the world population.
Separately and significantly, we have acquired, cataloged, and integrated various data available on all known viruses (~250,000) identified to date. This repository of information is dissemi- nated through a website that we launched called Virus World database (VWdb) https://viperdb. org/vw). Our database includes information
on virus taxonomy, sequence, and structures, as well as the diseases they cause, associated symptoms, the hosts they affect, and more.
In addition, for ease of access to this informa- tion, we created a number of web tools (e.g., viral taxonomy explorer and viral diseases explorer) that are available at VWdb. We believe that these web tools will greatly benefit the world’s scientif- ic research community, as well as the common public. This work was published in the Journal
of Virology (https://doi.org/10.1128/jvi.00620- 23) and recently featured in an online science magazine, Scientia (https://doi.org/10.33548/ SCIENTIA1043).
In addition, we continue to maintain the
popular virus structure database, VIPERdb (https://viperdb.org), an online repository of virus structures, illustrations, and structure-derived properties with residue level annotations of primarily spherical viruses, whose structures have been determined at near atomic resolution by X-ray crystallography and cryoEM (https:// doi.org/10.1093/nar/gkaa1096).
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