The Brooke lab is home to post-doctoral fellows, undergraduates and graduate students who are working to understand how influenza adapts and transmits. Two of the lab’s key areas of research are genomic diversity—that is, variation in flu particles on the genetic level—and collective interactions between flu particles during the process of infection.
“Every day is a new journey of discovery. There are always challenging puzzles to be solved and pieces of evidence to be put together to become knowledge,” said Fadi Alnaji, a postdoctoral fellow who designs and conducts experiments using Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) that help characterize the factors affecting the virus’ evolution and transmission.
Alnaji also develops bioinformatics analytical tools, including visualization and statistical examination, to correlate the NGS data to its biological relevance. Recent investigations into defective interfering particles (DIPs), a type of viral particle that loses a critical part of its genome after replication, have proven particularly intriguing.
Identifying and characterizing hundreds of DIPs will “help us and others in understanding their biological roles,” Alnaji explained. “These molecules are generated by the virus itself and possess antiviral activity, which makes them a potential target for designing a new, efficient, smart vaccine.”
One of the highlights of Alnaji’s work is collaborating with Brooke and his other colleagues.
“There is always room for constructive discussions and suggestions, which almost always lead to planning out novel, thrilling and challenging experiments—or discovering something,” he said.
Graduate student Jiayi Sun joined the lab in 2016 and has been instrumental in studying the behaviors of semi-infectious particles. These particles do not express a full set of genes when they infect a host cell, meaning that they must co-infect cells with other particles in a viral population in order to complement with each other and produce viral progeny.
Sun discovered a novel mechanism that governs the semi-infectious particles’ ability to co- infect.
“I hope to explore and find more about the effects of viral heterogeneity on replication and evolution,” Sun said, adding, “I think these efforts will eventually transform into discoveries and publications.”
MCB and psychology major Morgan Samanic, one of the Brooke lab’s undergraduate researchers, has always been fascinated by viruses.
“Even though they are so small, they are very smart and they can do a lot of damage,” she said.
In the lab, Samanic learns something new every day, “whether that be a new concept of how the influenza virus works, how to analyze next generation sequencing data or how results never seem to turn out as expected.”
In the future, she hopes to learn more about DIPs and how they interact with the virus’ genome, so that, “hopefully, this information can guide us as to how we can potentially fight the flu.”
Samanic, too, appreciates Brooke’s mentorship.
“Whenever I meet with him, he always pushes me to look for things I can improve on while also recognizing my accomplishments. I appreciate that he pushes me like he does the other members of the lab.”
