SPEAKER: DR. SOURISH GHOSH

AFFILIATION: Visiting Fellow (Postdoc) at National Heart, Lung, Blood Institute (NHLBI), National Institutes of Health (NIH), USA

DATE: 19.02.2019

TIME: 4 P.M.

VENUE: 1st FLOOR SEMINAR ROOM

ABSTRACT FOR THE TALK:

Stand-alone virus particles have long been believed to be the infectious units for viral pathogenesis. We challenged this theory and showed that viruses are more infectious when they travel together within host cell derived extracellular vesicles (EVs) and are also stable through transmission. We validated our proposition in case of fecal-oral transmission of Rotaviruses and Noroviruses. Travelling inside EVs not only favours the high multiplicity of infection but also keeps them stable en-route through the acidic stomach environment to reach the intestinal cells. In addition to that we also discovered that shuttling inside the vesicles protect the viral population from host neutralizing antibodies that further enhances their infectivity.