Mosquito-transmitted flaviviruses such as Zika, Dengue, and West Nile viruses can cause severe human diseases and pose a substantial threat to public health. To date, no approved vaccine for specific treatment is available for these viruses.
Therefore, the ultimate goal of our team is to find a way of stopping their transmission. To do this we investigate how flaviviruses interact with insect host and enable their transmission to vertebrates including humans. We recently discovered that noncoding RNA produced by Zika virus prevents cell death of infected cells in mosquito salivary glands, which allows for virus secretion into saliva and transmission (Nature Communications 2021). We then found that production of this noncoding RNA is extremely conserved among all flaviviruses and was a major factor governing their evolution (Nature Communications, 2022).
Our team is also studying insect-specific flaviviruses. These viruses only infect mosquitoes and cannot be transmitted to humans. The interest to insect-specific viruses is due to their ability to make infected mosquitoes incapable of transmitting diseases, the phenomenon called superinfection exclusion. We recently developed fluorescent insect-specific virus, which allows for easy visualisation of infected cells and is an exciting novel tool for studying superinfection exclusion (Viruses, 2022). Now Dr Andrii Slonchak is using this tool in combination with novel advanced transcriptomics techniques to find out why and how insect flavivriuses make mosquitoes resistant to the pathogenic ones. To conduct this research, he was awarded a prestigious ARC Future Fellowship.
Our team collaborates extensively with the group of Dr Jody Hobson-Peters (SCMB-UQ) and with mosquito experts from QIMR Berghofer, Prof Gregory Devine and Dr Leon Hugo. This collaboration occurs within the framework of Australian Infections Diseases Research Centre (AIDRC), a strategic investment of UQ established to promote collaboration and inter-disciplinary research to solve the global issues related to the infectious diseases.
Journal articles
- Structural analysis of 3’UTRs in insect flaviviruses reveals novel determinants of sfRNA biogenesis and provides new insights into flavivirus evolution
- Zika virus noncoding RNA suppresses apoptosis and is required for virus transmission by mosquitoes
- Reporter Flaviviruses as Tools to Demonstrate Homologous and Heterologous Superinfection Exclusion