i met a problem and i've been working in campus lab to the u burke
program and we are studying h p v or human couple on the virus type
sixteen
and h p v types sixteen is the main cause of cervical cancer it causes
fifty percent of all cervical cancers each year
all the other h p v types combined account the other fifty percent
and the question we wanted to solve when it comes h p v infection
is how does invade a whole cell and set up a success one faction
and h p v is a non on the left virus and so when it
gets taken into a cell
it encounters a serious there you're to its successful infection in the form of an
in this normal member
when it gets taken in
it has to get its genome across the non polar
and is a membrane this is a difficult process because the aging on is very
pull
in order to do this the
the virus somehow has to disrupt that membrane or for a pork process
we don't know which way h p v is doing whether just completely destroying the
and dissolve or if it's forming a small or through which can get it you
know so we found this trend membrane region on that caps approaching
when we looked closer at it we found these highly conserved g x three g
motives all throughout the trans membrane domain
g extra g motifs
are
protein multi switch in which there's one nikolai seen then three of any amino acid
then another glancing
these motives of previously been shown to mediate trans membrane domain interactions within membrane so
they the question is an extremely small amino acid
so what that what these three g motif do is on alpha helix
puts the glide things right on top of each other and sense that pricing is
so small it provides almost like a slot where other trends membrane domains containing z
x three john g motifs can slide into each other in interact all so that
are l two peptide or are l two region
and then a mute of the l two that we created for the each team
you
the teaching and essentially just insert several very polar amino acids in to the middle
of the trans membrane domain which otherwise is very non polar
and what we found it is that the wild type l two trends member a
domain doesn't fact function as at remembering domain but are each d you version does
not so we now know that the
defect in
the h t mutant is that it can't escape the end result
so
we then we're and we wanted to
study more closely those d x three d motifs and how they affect this process
and so we created several alan insertion you switch unlike the h t new do
not destroy to trans membrane functionalities of this region but what it will do is
it'll throw out of key all those d x three g motifs
and what we found with those means is that
the one called eight fifty five was completely non infectious
the a sixty was slightly infectious and the a sixty four was completely normal so
this tells us the team or and terminology extra g might use are essential for
infection the more see terminal ones or not
we then went into a
we then wanted to study
what exactly those the extra g motifs are interacting with and interacting with themselves or
their interacting with some unknown factor given the way h p v works most people
clearly infection on their own
and it doesn't become a problem joe years after the actual infection process is over
it doesn't sir this peptide isn't really medically relevant
two age pvi stopping h p v infection but we hope to take that same
idea and applied to more medically relevant viruses that might use the same type of
infection system
and so
in conclusion
essentially what we found is that
h p v gets a genome across that and is normal membrane by using a
trend member a domain your the end terminus of l two which can change g
x three g maltese along which the l two protein interacts with itself and perhaps
other proteins form for that the genome can get through