Congratulations to Emily, who presented a poster titled “Examining the dynamics of type I interferon-mediated JAK-STAT signaling within the innate immune response” at Cytokines 2019! The conference, held by the International Cytokine and Interferon Society, was held in Vienna, Austria.

Says Emily, “the conference was a great way to meet more scientists studying the complexities of cytokine and interferon signaling, and some of the talks really challenged what has been taken for granted in this field. Plus, Vienna was a beautiful place to explore!”

Congratulations are in order for Dr. Lei Wei, who won the highly coveted “Best Talk by Postdoctoral Researcher” prize at the Princeton University Annual Molecular Biology Departmental Retreat this year! His talk, which had the riveting title “Making a murderer – Formation of hepatitis B virus cccDNA”, featured his recent work identifying host factors necessary for the formation of HBV cccDNA.

Congratulations also to Ila, who presented a poster on her work titled “Isocotoin Potently Inhibits Hepatitis E Virus Replication through Interference with Heat Shock Protein 90”! 

The retreat was held in the beachside town of Avalon, New Jersey, and the whole lab enjoyed learning about the science happening in our department. We thank the Princeton University Molecular Biology Department, in particular Terry MacFarland, for organizing this consistently wonderful event every year.

We are very excited to welcome back a familiar face! Jiayu Zhang, who was previously a visiting student in the Ploss lab, has returned as a rotation student this fall! Jiayu completed his M.Sc. in Cell Biology at Zhejiang University School of Medicine in June 2019, and he is now a first-year graduate student in the Princeton University Department of Molecular Biology. He will be continuing his work on yellow fever virus in the Ploss Lab and starting a new project characterizing clinical isolates of dengue virus during his rotation. We are very happy to have him back!

Congratulations to DOCTOR Jenna Gaska, who on August 29th defended her thesis titled “Molecular determinants of hepatitis C virus species tropism!” Jenna is the second doctoral student to receive her PhD in the Ploss lab, and she graduates with nine publications, plus one currently in review.

We are so proud of Jenna for her work on HCV tropism in vitro, which has led to many interesting discoveries in the field, and for learning bioinformatics (from scratch!) as a tool to analyze RNAseq data. Additionally, Jenna is an excellent editor and writer and has helped Ploss lab members with countless manuscript drafts and grant proposals. We are extremely proud of you, Jenna!

A selected list of Jenna’s publications from the Ploss lab:

• Winer BY, Gaska JM, Lipkowitz G, et al. Analysis of host responses to hepatitis B and delta viral infections in a micro-scalable hepatic co-culture system. Hepatology. 2019.
• Gaska JM, Balev M, Ding Q, Heller B, Ploss A. Differences across cyclophilin A orthologs contribute to the host range restriction of hepatitis C virus. Elife. 2019.
• Gaska JM, Ding Q, Ploss A. Mouse Models for Studying HCV Vaccines and Therapeutic Antibodies. Methods Mol Biol. 2019;1911:481-503.
• Ding Q, Gaska JM, Douam F, et al. Species-specific disruption of STING-dependent antiviral cellular defenses by the Zika virus NS2B3 protease. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA. 2018;115(27):E6310-E6318.
• Douam F, Gaska JM, Winer BY, Ding Q, Von schaewen M, Ploss A. Genetic Dissection of the Host Tropism of Human-Tropic Pathogens. Annu Rev Genet. 2015;49:21-45.
• Gaska JM, Ploss A. Study of viral pathogenesis in humanized mice. Curr Opin Virol. 2015;11:14-20.