Legionella pneumophila is a ubiquitous fresh-water bacterium which reproduces within its erstwhile predators, environmental amoeba, by subverting the normal pathway of phagocytosis and degradation. The molecular mechanisms which confer resistance to amoeba are apparently conserved and also allow replication within macrophages. Thus, L. pneumophila can act as an 'accidental' human pathogen and c...

Cytosolic bacterial pathogens must evade intracellular innate immune recognition and clearance systems such as autophagy to ensure their survival and proliferation. The intracellular cycle of the bacterium Francisella tularensis is characterized by rapid phagosomal escape followed by extensive proliferation in the macrophage cytoplasm. Cytosolic replication, but not phagosomal escape, requires ...

Flaviviruses are vector-borne RNA viruses, many of which clinically relevant human viral pathogens, such as dengue, Zika, Japanese encephalitis, West Nile and yellow fever viruses. Millions people infected with these viruses around the world each year. Vaccines only available for some members this large virus family, there no effective antiviral drugs to treat flavivirus infections. The unmet n...

Replication of the hepatitis B virus is suppressed by deficiency of the X protein. Although several molecules that block cellular targets of X protein reduce the production of hepatitis B virus progeny, the effect of a specific inhibitor of X protein on viral replication has not been investigated. To block X protein specifically, we adopted an intracellular expression approach using H7 single c...

Objective(s): The rotavirus nonstructural protein 4 (NSP4) is responsible for the increase in cytoplasmic calcium concentration through a phospholipase C-dependent and phospholipase C-independent pathways in infected cells. It is shown that increasing of intracellular calcium concentration in rotavirus infected cells is associated with the activation of some members of protein kinases family su...

Legionella pneumophila translocates multiple bacterial effector proteins into host cells to direct formation of a replication vacuole for the bacterium. The emerging consensus is that formation of this compartment involves recruitment of membrane material that traffics between the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) and Golgi. To investigate this model, a targeted approach was used to knock down express...

Viruses move intracellularly to their replication compartments, and the newly synthesized viral complexes are transported to neighboring cells through hijacking of the host endomembrane systems. During these processes, numerous interactions occur among viral proteins, host proteins, and the cytoskeleton system. This review mainly focuses on the plant endomembrane network, which may be utilized ...

Francisella tularensis is a gram-negative intracellular pathogen that produces severe infection known as Tularemia. RNA-Seq data revealed in the presence of erythrocytes, several genes encoding putative transcriptional regulators were modulated: FTL_0671, FTL_1199, and FTL_1665. Gene deletion strains constructed using LVS. The objective this project was to screen these gene for attenuation. A m...