When viral RNA met the cell: a story of host-virus interactions
November 19 @ 15:00 – 16:00 CET

Speaker: Professor Alfredo Castello
Biography
Alfredo is a biologist by training and holds a PhD in Molecular Biology from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. He completed his postdoctoral training at the EMBL in Heidelberg, where later he became a staff scientist. In 2014, he was recruited as a Principal Investigator in the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Oxford. Later, in 2020, he joined the MRC-University of Glasgow Centre for Virus Research (CVR) as a Senior Lecturer and since 2022, he became Professor in Systems Virology at the same institution. In 2021, Dr. Castello was awarded an ERC Consolidator Grant. Additionally, he has received funding from several prestigious agencies in the UK and the EU, including the Wellcome Trust, the Medical Research Council (both a Career Development Award and Research grant), and Horizon Europe. As a highlight of his work, he set a fundamental stepstone towards the elucidation of the cellular RNA-binding proteome, which has opened many new avenues of research in the RNA community. He recently applied his methodology to virus infection, discovering a new universe of host-virus interactions controlling infection.
Abstract
RNA is a central molecule in RNA virus biology acting not only as a messenger RNA, but also for storage of the genetic information as a genome. Over the last two decades it has become apparent that viral RNA is a hub for key host-virus interactions. For example, viral genomes are too restricted in size to encode many of the molecular machineries required to metabolise the viral RNA. Just to provide some perspective, a typical RNA virus would encode ~10 proteins in average, while the ribosome, the machinery required for protein synthesis, is composed by over 80 proteins and 3 ribosomal (r)RNAs. The lack of these critical cellular machineries makes viruses reliant on host resources, stressing the importance of cellular RNA-binding proteins (RBPs) contributing to the metabolism of viral RNAs. The cell also possess an arsenal of RBPs with the role of sensing viral RNAs and triggering the antiviral response. Unfortunately, the methods to study these host-virus interactions globally and with molecular details have only started to emerge. My talk will elaborate in the application of these methodologies while exploring two research lines derived from our research: i) why cellular mRNAs are often degraded as a consequence of infection and ii) why a subset of nuclear RBPs travel to the cytosol upon infection with cytoplasmic viruses.
Host: Eduardo Sagredo Campos