Investigating the mechanistic basis of viral immune evasion

Cytomegaloviruses (CMV) are a family of species-specific viruses that have evolved sophisticated strategies to interfere with host immunity, thereby allowing these viruses to establish a lifelong infection within the host. The effectiveness of CMV’s immune evasion strategies is emphasised by the fact that 40-90% of the human adult population harbours human CMV (HCMV), which represents the most common cause of birth defects and disabilities in industrialized nations. The overwhelming success of CMV is due to the large size of its genome, which offers the virus the capacity to encode an arsenal of 'immunoevasin' proteins, whose sole function is to interfere with host immunity. My group has made seminal contributions to our understanding of how CMV subverts host immunity (Berry et al Nature Immunology 2013, Aguilar et al Cell 2017) and currently has a number of project available to further explore this axis.