Development of Biomolecular Tools for Studying Host-Virus Interactions of the Hepatitis C Virus
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Hepatitis C virus (HCV) is a growing health concern in Canada and around the world, as it currently infects 3% of the global population. While there is no vaccine available against this virus, novel and effective treatment regimens have improved prospects for the cure of HCV. Complications caused by HCV can lead to severe liver disease and even death. The limited viral proteome forces HCV to rely heavily on various host factors for its replication. Additionally HCV modulates the host physiology to facilitate its pathogenesis; consequently, the in dept study of essential host-virus interactions expands our understandingof how the virus and related species commandere host cell machinery. This understanding can help create new therapeutic strategies, which may have applications towards HCV and other related RNA viruses. While numerous studies have demonstrated that HCV modulates the abundance of various host proteins, the systematic study of the virus’s effect on the enzymatic activity has been relatively unexplored. For this reason, activity-based protein profiling (ABPP) was applied to study the changes in the activity of host enzymes during HCV replication. ABPP is a functional proteomics technique that employs active site-directed probe (ABP) to report on the activity of enzymes within complex proteomes, such as living cells. Herein, directed and non-directed ABPs were employed for specific as well as global profiling of the alterations in the activity of cellular enzymes during HCV replication. As a result, essential host enzymes that are differentially active during HCV infection were identified. Furthermore, I have developed a quantitative ABPP method for relative quantification of the cellular enzymes activity during HCV infection. These results contribute to the discovery of disease-associated biomarkers, with diagnostic significance, and aid in the identification of potential targets for therapeutic interventions. In addition to developing protein-based tools to study host-virus interactions, I employed a novel technique to investigate the interactions of micro-RNA 122 (miR-122), an essential HCV host factor, with the viral RNA genome. This in vitro screening approach, interrogates the folding of HCV RNA using viral RNA-coated magnetic bead (VRB) to determine target site accessibility for RNA silencing. This method predicts the relative affinity of small RNAs towards HCV genomic RNA that are not easily predicted by informatic means, and led to discovery of potent miR-122 interaction site within the large, highly-structured HCV RNA genome. For that reason, VRB assay may represent an attractive tool for the examination of target site accessibility for RNA silencing.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".