[Faculty] Fwd: [CSRC.COLLOQUIUM] "Bridging the Biophysics and Evolution of Viruses "

[Jose Castillo]

[image: SDSU_CSRC Logo.jpg]


DATE:
*Friday, February 11, 2022*


TITLE:
*Bridging the Biophysics and Evolution of Viruses *


TIME:
*3:30-4:30PM*



LOCATION:
*In Person - GMCS 314*
or
Join Zoom Meeting -   https://SDSU.zoom.us/j/84471061245


SPEAKER/BIO:
*Antoni Luque, Mathematics and Statistics, San Diego State University  *



ABSTRACT:
Viruses are the most abundant biological entity on Earth and play a pivotal
role in regulating the evolution of organisms and the planet's
biogeochemistry. Most viruses protect their genome in icosahedral shells
made of multiple copies of the same protein.Viral icosahedral shells span
two orders of magnitude in size and thousands of different architectures.
Yet, the physical mechanisms that have selected such diverse viral
structures are unknown. Here, I will share my lab's most recent
contributions to this fundamental problem. First, I will introduce the
generalized quasi-equivalence theory of icosahedral architectures as a
framework to investigate systematically viral architectures and their
protein components. Second, I will show how the physical relationship
between the protein shell and genome of viruses has opened the door to
characterize uncultured viruses, predict the existence of unknown viruses,
and engineer new viruses from the environment. Finally, I will discuss a
novel physical mechanism that may hold the key to how viruses explore
different viral architectures.

Bio: Dr. Luque is an Associate Professor in the Department of Mathematics
and Statistics at San Diego State University (SDSU). His expertise is in
theoretical and computational biophysics, and his research interest is at
the interface of physical virology and viral ecology and evolution. He
received his Ph.D. in physics from the Universitat of Barcelona in 2011 for
his study on the structural, mechanical, and self-assembly properties of
viruses. His postdoctoral training was at New York University, where he
investigated chromatin using multiscale protein-DNA computational models.
He became a faculty at SDSU in 2015, where he joined the interdisciplinary
Viral Information Institute and the Computational Science Research Center.
Dr. Luque has made significant contributions to the fields of physical
virology, viral ecology, and chromatin, including new theoretical
frameworks to investigate icosahedral and elongated viruses as well as the
life cycle of viruses of microbes based on the physical properties of
microbial communities. His interdisciplinary work has resulted in
high-impact publications, including Nature, Nature Communications, PNAS,
Physical Review Letters, and Nucleic Acids Research. Dr.Luque is the first
faculty at SDSU to have received the California Faculty Innovation and
Leadership Award. His research is currently funded by the National Science
Foundation and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.

Presenter Website <https://www.luquelab.com/>
Google Scholar
<https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=ytvnI68AAAAJ&hl=en>


Host:
*Parag Katira*

Note: Videos of previous colloquium talks can be seen on the CSRC website
in the colloquium archive section or on the CSRC YouTube page here
<https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCN0ZEztlmyDqG2pm-Rle_Eg/feed>.





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