Sherer Lab
Principal Investigator: Nathan M Sherer
Institution: University of Wisconsin–Madison (Madison, WI)
Primary Subfield: Immunology
Recruitment Status: ✅ Accepting PhD Students
Research Focus
PROJECT SUMMARY / ABSTRACT There are more than 38 million people still living with HIV-1 infection worldwide, and more than 1.1 million in the United States alone. HIV-1 acute infection and latency reversal are both dependent on the expression of full- length unspliced viral RNAs (US-vRNAs) that serve dual roles in the cytoplasm as either (1) viral mRNAs encoding Gag and Gag-Pol proteins that drive virus particle assembly or (2) viral RNA genome substrates bound by Gag/Gag-Pol for packaging into virions. This project combines live cell and super-resolution imaging, biochemical assays, and other research tools to address key foundational issues in HIV-1 US-vRNA subcellular trafficking with the goal of exposing new virus and cell biology of potential relevance to novel antiviral strategies. Aim 1 is to determine why HIV-1 evolved to exploit a highly unconventional RNA export machinery regulated by Exportin-1 (XPO1, also known as CRM1) for US-vRNA nucleocytoplasmic transport, and how cooperativity- based RNA-protein interactions regulated by the viral Rev protein serve to activate this pathway. Our preliminary data and prior studies support a model wherein Rev multimerization on the U…
Active NIH Awards
- 5R01AI110221-12: The Cell Biology of HIV-1 Genome Trafficking (2026)
- 5P01CA022443-48: Core B - Instrumentation (2026)
- 1R01AI192262-01A1: Deciphering HIV-1 alternatively spliced transcript functionality with HyPR-MS (2026)
- 2R01AI110221-11A1: The Cell Biology of HIV-1 Genome Trafficking (2025)
- 5P01CA022443-47: Core B - Instrumentation (2025)
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