UNC HIV Cure Seminar Series : Breaking the Sugar Code of HIV Latency

Speaker: Mohamed Abdel-Mohsen, PhD
Research Scientist
Blood Systems Research Institute (BRSI)
University of California at San Francisco (UCSF)

Aug. 25, 2016
9:00 – 10:00 a.m.
1131 Bioinformatics
UNC Campus (directions)

All living cells assemble a diverse repertoire of glycan structures on their surface via their glycosylation machinery. With recent advances in glycobiology, cell-surface glycosylation and lectin-glycan signaling have been shown to play critical roles in immune response and both cell-cell as well as cell-pathogen interactions. Glycan structure alterations have been identified as biomarkers for cancer and have been utilized to design carbohydrate-based therapeutic vaccines. Activated, HIV-infected cells have altered cell-surface glycosylation patterns with respect to resting, uninfected cells. Additionally, the association between hyposialylation and chronic HIV infection has been established in vivo. Nevertheless, the relevance of host glycosylation to HIV latency has yet to be characterized. There’s been very little attention paid to how the sugar coating on the surface of host cells affects the fate of the virus that lies inside. This sugar coating may hold the key to new therapeutics that can be harnessed to cure HIV and possibly a range of other infectious diseases.