Post by Scripps Research

Scripps Research has received more than $500,000 in first-year funding of a five-year R01 grant worth a total of approximately $4.2 million from The National Institutes of Health to advance technologies for studying viral proteins and antibody responses, tools that could aid the design of vaccines against deadly pathogens like HIV. This award supports efforts to refine and expand platforms that analyze viral proteins in conditions that more closely resemble real viruses, moving beyond the simplified truncated versions of proteins typically used in labs. The project extends recent work from Scripps Research senior scientist Kimmo Rantalainen, along with colleagues from the labs of professors William Schief and Andrew Ward, describing a platform that embeds full-length viral proteins into small, lipid particles known as nanodiscs, enabling scientists to study viral proteins as they exist on a virus, attached to the pathogen’s membrane. More: https://ow.ly/wbJ450YIoue