En savoir plus

Dr Laurent Chatel-Chaix will present his work on "Mitochondrial manipulations by flaviviruses”, Thursday 29th, September 2022, at 3 pm, on Zoom.

Please note the date change: The seminar will be held on Thursday 29th, September (and not 22 as previously announced).

Host: Pierre-Yves Lozach (IVPC) and François-Loïc Cosset (CIRI)

With no available therapies, infections with flaviviruses constitute a major public health concern worldwide. While dengue virus (DENV) causes the most prevalent arthropod-borne viral disease and may be fatal, ZiPlease the date change: The seminar will be held on Thursday 29th, September (and not 22th as previously announced).a virus (ZIKV) infection in utero can lead to severe neurodevelopmental defects in newborns, including congenital microcephaly. In Canada, West Nile virus is endemic and causes severe encephalitis and eventually death. Thus, there is an urgent need to better understand flavivirus pathogenesis at the molecular level in order to identify novel antiviral targets.

In order to generate an intracellular environment favorable to viral replication, flaviviruses induce the morphogenesis of organelle-like viral replication factories (vRF) via poorly understood mechanisms. These vRFs host viral RNA replication and regulate several processes important for viral pathogenesis. In addition, vRFs make contact with mitochondria, which in turn exhibit an altered morphology. This correlates with drastic perturbations in their composition, metabolic activity, and contribution to critical antiviral processes such as innate immunity and apoptosis. However, the molecular mechanisms governing this flavivirus-mediated mitochondrial reprogramming and how this impact viral replication remain mostly enigmatic. This seminar will present the latest results of the Chatel-Chaix lab focusing on how DENV and ZIKV infections perturb mitochondrial morphology and functions to generate a cytoplasmic environment prone to sustained replication.

Dr. Laurent Chatel-Chaix obtained in 2007 his PhD of Biochemistry from the University of Montréal (Canada), which focused on the relationship between human immunodeficiency virus and a cellular RNA-binding protein. He carried out his first postdoctoral training with Pr. Daniel Lamarre at the Institute for Research in Immunology and Cancer and the Centre Hospitalier de l’Université de Montréal (Montréal, Canada) during which he discovered novel virus/host interactions required for the infection with hepatitis C virus. Then, he carried on with his postdoctoral training at the University of Heidelberg (Germany) in the team of Pr. Ralf Bartenschlager to work on the molecular biology of flaviviruses, including dengue virus, Zika virus, and West Nile virus.

In 2016, Dr Chatel-Chaix joined the faculty at the Centre Armand-Frappier Santé Biotechnologie of the National Institute of Scientific Research (INRS, Laval, Canada). With the aim to better understand flavivirus pathogenesis and to identify new promising antiviral targets, his research team focuses on the identification of flavivirus/host interactions engaged in the viral hijacking of cellular machinery important for the infection. He has received the 2016 Bhagirath Singh Early Career Award in Infection and Immunity from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. Since 2018, he is a junior research scholar of the Fonds de Recherche du Québec en Santé.

Connect to the seminar on Zoom