IVPC seminar Wednesday September 13th, 2023; 11am

Fasséli Coulibaly’s will present his work on ”The architectures of two beneficial viruses reveal novel twists in the assembly of complex viruses”, Wednesday 13^th of September 2023, at 11 am in la salle des Thèses Chantal Rabourdin-Combe, ENS de Lyon. If you are interested in discussing  with Dr Coulibaly during his visit to Lyon, please contact Pierre-Yves Lozach. 

Fasséli Coulibaly’s passion for Structural Virology dates back from his PhD with Félix Rey awarded in 2003 by the University of Paris-Sud. After four wonderful and productive years at the University of Auckland, he joined Monash University to establish the Structural Virology lab with fellowships from the NHMRC and ARC, successively. He is currently an Associate Professor in the Biomedical Discovery Institute. Fasséli’s research revolves around the biology of complex viruses that pose fundamental questions about self-assembly, membrane remodelling and the origin of viruses. He uses an integrated structural virology approach that combines cryo-EM, serial microcrystallography, in vivo diffraction and XFEL. Currently his lab focuses on the assembly of large DNA viruses with complex architectures and the structure-based investigations of hidden evolutionary relationships within the virosphere. Ultimately, some of his discoveries aim to inform the engineering of novel biomedical tools inspired by viral strategies such as phage therapy and vaccines. 

Abstract:

Metagenomics and structural biology have revolutionized our view of the virosphere, highlighting an extraordinary diversity of viruses in all ecosystems including our own body. Besides their pathogenic potential, it has become clear that viruses play a myriad of roles in the environment, many of which are beneficial to human activities. I will present our structural work on viruses that could be considered as our allies in several ways. In a first part, I will describe how the study of an Australian insect-specific flavivirus revealed the first complete structure of an immature flavivirus. We further used this virus as a platform for the rapid and high-resolution cryo-EM structure determination of pathogenic flaviviruses, including dengue virus. Together, these structures support an elegant drop-lock model of maturation that is likely to be conserved across most flaviviruses and could be targeted by antivirals. The second part will focus on our unpublished cryo-EM structure of an insect virus broadly used in biotechnology. This structure reveals a unique architecture, which explains the ability to package a highly-pressurised DNA genome and reveals complex viral structures involved in actin-tail driven propulsion and genome packaging. An evolutionary scenario for the emergence of these complex viruses will be discussed.

Host: Pierre-Yves Lozach