Objective
Infectious diseases kill 16 million people world-wide each year. Understanding how the immune system functions to sense and fight pathogens is essential for improving human health. A key host response to infection is the production of type I interferons (IFN). STING (Stimulator of IFN Genes) is a protein proposed to be essential for host type I IFN production in response to various intracellular pathogens including DNA and RNA viruses and bacteria. The reasons that STING may be involved in host defence against such a broad spectrum of pathogens is that STING is a critical player in the signalling pathway activated by cytosolic sensing of viral and bacterial DNA leading to type I IFN induction. Studies done in STING-deficient mice have demonstrated that STING is essential for host defence against viral infections. However the in vivo role of STING in intracellular bacterial pathogen infections is not clear. Moreover, it is not completely understood how and where STING activates type I IFN production in the cell. In this proposal, the Fellow will adopt biochemical and cell biology approaches to define the STING-mediated DNA sensing signalling pathway as well as the intracellular location(s) where signalling takes place (Objective A). The Fellow will use a conditional STING-deficient mouse that he recently generated to study the in vivo role of STING in host defence against intracellular pathogen infections (Objective B). This proposal is designed to utilize the strengths of both the Fellow and the Host lab to facilitate mutual transfer of knowledge and expertise for both parties. The host lab has a strong interest in studying the role of STING in sensing pathogen DNA, and the Fellow will provide the expertise and tools to allow these studies to bear fruit. In turn, the Fellow will obtain knowledge and technical expertise in a world-class innate immunity lab, which will help him expand his research network, attain an independent position and advance his career.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
- medical and health scienceshealth sciencesinfectious diseasesRNA viruses
- natural sciencesbiological sciencesgeneticsDNA
- natural sciencesbiological sciencesbiochemistrybiomoleculesproteins
- natural sciencesbiological sciencescell biology
- medical and health sciencesbasic medicineimmunology
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Call for proposal
FP7-PEOPLE-2011-IIF
See other projects for this call
Funding Scheme
MC-IIF - International Incoming Fellowships (IIF)Coordinator
D02 CX56 Dublin
Ireland