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Dr Anat Melamed will present her work on " Selective clonal persistence of HTLV-1 in vivo: radial chromatin organization, integration site, and host transcription”, Thursday 24th of March 2022, at 1pm on Zoom.

The human retroviruses HTLV-1 and HIV-1 persist in vivo, despite the host immune response and antiretroviral therapy, as a reservoir of latently infected T-cell clones, each clone defined by the unique genomic integration site (IS) of the single-copy HTLV-1 provirus.   It is poorly understood what determines which clones survive in the reservoir and which are lost. To test the hypothesis that HTLV-1 persistence in vivo depends on the intranuclear position of the provirus, we compared the genomic location of >230,000 IS of HTLV-1 from in vitro infection with that of >160,000 IS identified in peripheral blood mononuclear cells of individuals persistently infected with HTLV-1. In this talk, I shall discuss three factors we have identified as associated with clonal survival of HTLV-1, which together explained >40% of the observed variance in clone survival of HTLV-1 in vivo.

Dr. Anat Melamed is a research associate in the lab of Prof. Charles Bangham at Imperial College London. During her time in the laboratory, she has played a significant role in the design and use of a high-throughput method for the identification and quantification of retroviral integration sites. Shifting her focus to computational biology, Anat now works on a number of projects investigating the consequences of HTLV-1 integration both for the virus and the host.

Host: Jocelyn Turpin (PR2T-IVPC)