We are so proud of Alex for successfully defending her MPH thesis in the Pitt School of Public Health today! She did a fantastic job and we can’t wait to see all the great things she does when she joins PMI in the fall!

The Ambrose Lab is seeking a postdoctoral fellow to join our team to understand how SARS-CoV-2 replicates in cells. Apply online at https://www.join.pitt.edu/find-positions, Job #24001352.

Join us in Palm Springs in October for the 28th West Coast Retroviruses Meeting. Visit the website for more details!

Meriem recently attended the 2023 Annual Biomedical Research Conference for Minoritized Scientists (ABRCMS) conference in sunny Phoenix, Arizona. She presented a poster entitled, “Characterizing New Humanized Mouse Models for Investigating HIV-1 Infection,” which was based on experiments she completed with Chandra this semester. Not only did Meriem receive a travel grant to attend ABRCMS, she […]

The Pitt Biomedical Graduate Student Association (BGSA) Symposium was held on November 1st at the new Assembly Building. Zac’s abstract was one of the 6 that were invited for an oral presentation out of approximately 120 abstracts! He gave a nice talk (“HIV-1 nuclear entry requires spatiotemporal binding of cyclophilin A and CPSF6 to capsid”), […]

Chandra’s work has been published, in which he evaluated the ability of pediatric thymus tissue implanted either in leg muscle or under the renal capsule with allogeneic CD34+ hematopoietic stem cells in NSG mice to reconstitute human immune cells and provide a model for rectal HIV-1 transmission. These models were compared with traditional BLT mice […]

Congratulations to Zac for presenting a talk on his research at the 2023 Cold Spring Harbor Retroviruses meeting!           Zac represented the lab well at CSH. Apparently he was a finalist in the new RetroCard game, which rewards trainees for asking questions during the meeting.     And he met many […]

Congratulations to Alex for recently defending her BPhil honors thesis project, “Developing an efficient binding assay to quantify molecular interactions with the profilin protein,” which she conducted in Dr. Andy VanDemark’s lab. She graduates from the Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences this weekend and officially becomes a MPH student in the Department of Infectious […]

Our collaborators Alex Guseman and Angela Gronenborn proposed that lectins in the Oscillatoria agardhii agglutinin (OAA) family could bind SARS-CoV-2 S protein and inhibit infection. Using S pseudotyped lentivirus, Chandra showed that one OAA lectin, BOA, could potently inhibit infection (2 nM EC50). This was confirmed in collaboration with the Duprex lab and David Martinez […]

Richa’s paper from when she was in the lab has been published.  She had a lot of help from Youya as well as Chris and Doug. The aim of the study was to determine why a specific polymorphic amino acid substitution in HIV-1 reverse transcriptase (RT), V179I, arises in people living with HIV and treated […]