The Institut Pasteur-UCSF QBI Center of Excellence in Emerging Infectious Diseases Seminar Series presents Anastassia Komarova, Principal Investigator in the Interactomics, RNA, and Immunity Laboratory at Institut Pasteur & Director of the Institut Pasteur-Oncovita Laboratory. 

In 2003, Dr. Komarova graduated from the Shemyakin Institute of Bioorganic Chemistry, Russian Academy of Science, Moscow. During her thesis, she studied how functional elements within prokaryotic mRNAs affect translation initiation efficiency in vivo and in vitro. For her post-doctoral training, Dr. Komarova arrived at the Institut Pasteur. From the very beginning, her studies focused on virus-host interactions. In 2014, she became a permanent researcher at the Institut Pasteur, leading numerous collaborative projects focused on studying various roles of virus-host RNA-protein and protein-protein interactions in the innate immune response. Today, Dr. Komarova is a Principal Investigator in the Interactomics, RNA, and Immunity Laboratory, and since 2024, she has been the Director of the Institut Pasteur-Oncovita Laboratory, Institut Pasteur, Paris, France.

Pattern recognition receptors (PRRs) protect against host invasion by detecting the specific molecular patterns of pathogens and initiating an immune response. The RIG-I-like receptors (RLRs) detect viral RNA mostly in the cytosol and trigger an intracellular signaling cascade that leads to the production of pro-inflammatory cytokines, including type-I interferon (IFN). In her talk, Dr. Komarova will present how she and her team developed and validated a novel ribonucleoproteomic approach consisting of affinity purification of tagged RLRs from infected cells followed by next-generation sequencing (NGS) of associated RNA molecules. Using this approach, they have identified and validated RLR-specific viral agonists, expanding their knowledge of microbial-derived RLR ligands. They applied this approach to measles, rabies, chikungunya, dengue, HIV-1, and listeria infections. Additionally, they characterized the landscape of endogenous RNA ligands that engage RLRs upon infection with these pathogens.

Talk Title: Virus-host RNA-protein Interactions and Innate Immunity