Carolina Salguero

Nowadays it’s hard to open a newspaper without reading about the damage viruses are wreaking on world health: As clever as they are insidious, viruses show few signs of relinquishing their grasp anytime soon. And while each year scientists advance our understanding of how to fight them, so far little headway has been made toward eliminating a given virus completely.

Carolina Salguero, PhD candidate in molecular and cellular biology, explains that existing treatments of viruses like HIV include a cocktail of drugs intended to target various phases of viral replication, from entry to assembly. “RNA viruses mutate relatively quickly, so it’s hard to treat them with just one drug.” Salguero explains that at present, most anti-viral drugs for an RNA virus like HIV target viral particles that can change over time. “We want to target the parts of the viral genome that do not tolerate change so easily.”

Salguero’s work combines biochemistry with structural biology to understand the mechanism by which viruses like SARS control the amount of viral particles that are needed for the virus to become infectious. She studies a knotted structure in the SARS messenger RNA, or mRNA, that the host’s ribosomes read to make proteins.

As Salguero explains, in three dimensions this knotted portion of viral mRNA functions something like a switch: in one conformation, no production of certain proteins takes place, while in the other, it’s all systems go. Since the virus’s infectiousness depends on a strict ratio of its component parts, targeting this switch-like structure could be the key to nipping a virus like SARS, and eventually HIV, in the bud.

As Salguero puts it, “we can make 3D models of molecules inside of the cell without the use of a microscope. By combining structural and functional studies, we hope to understand how these viral switches function.” The implications of Salguero’s work are as exciting as they are big. “Our work could lead to the development of more effective anti-viral therapies.”