Rotation Projects

Rotation projects will involve construction of site-directed mutants or chimeras of either the attachment, fusion or V proteins and evaluation of their ability to promote the functions attributed to that protein. Depending on the target protein, the structure and function of each mutated or chimeric protein will be evaluated using several functional assays. These include flow cytometry (cell surface expression and antibody recognition), hemadsorption of red blood cells (receptor recognition activity), neuraminidase (receptor destroying activity), content mixing reporter gene assay (fusion), immunoprecipitation and SDS-PAGE (protein structure) and co-immunoprecipitation (determination of the ability of the mutated proteins to interact with a co-expressed protein). For the V protein, we will be evaluating various aspects of its interferon inhibitory activity.