WIKIMEDIA, CDC, TERRENCE TUMPEYVast amounts of time and research dollars go into studying how the quickly mutating influenza virus works, anticipating which strains will be most active each year, and changing the flu vaccine accordingly. Researchers from the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, recently approached the problem from a different perspective by looking at the host’s response to the virus. Amy Adamson and Hinissan Kohio showed that flu infection is linked to glucose metabolism in mammalian cells. They presented their work today (December 15) in a poster session at the American Society for Cell Biology meeting in New Orleans, Louisiana, and in a paper published in September in Virology.
“Understanding host responses to infection will be important,” said Olivia Perwitasari, who is a postdoctoral fellow in Ralph Tripp’s lab at the Univeristy of Georgia and was not involved in the work. “The majority of the focus in antiviral therapeutics is still trying to target the virus itself,” she said, but because viruses change so rapidly, and host targets are more stable, “targeting the host is up and coming.”
Adamson first became interested in host glucose metabolism and its link with influenza based on a screen in fruit flies, where glycolysis—the process by which glucose is converted to energy—pathway members appeared as potential regulators of viral infection. “It’s really kind of unconventional because most virologists are not going to be using fruit flies,” said Adamson, ...
