A student from International Master’s M2 “RNAES”, Deborah Udeh, is recruited for 6 months (from January 9 to July 8) to work at the B2S core facility as part of a collaborative project with a team of the LCPME laboratory that aims to identify the molecular basis responsible for the inactivation of human enteric viruses.

Human noroviruses are the major cause of waterborne and foodborne outbreaks in industrialized countries. They are also highly implicated each year in the winter gastroenteritis outbreaks of inter-human transmission. However, nothing is known about the inactivation mechanisms of these viruses in the environment and many questions about their in vivo replication are still remain to be answered, because the culture is hardly feasible in vitro and their cellular receptor(s) remain(s) unknown. Enteric F-specific RNA phages (Qb and MS2) are usually used as models to understand the behavior of these viruses in the environment. The main objective of the project is to purify recombinant forms of the main capsid protein (CP) of Qb and MS2 and to study the CP-RNA interactions using fluorescence-based and mass spectrometry techniques.   

This project is carried out in collaboration with the teams Environmental Microbiology of LCPME (UMR 7564, CNRS-Université de Lorraine) and Molecular and Structural Enzymology of IMoPA (UMR7365 CNRS-Université de Lorraine).