Sara Cherry, Ph.D.
The Cherry Lab is interested in the interface between viruses and hosts. The Lab uses chemical and genetic screening technologies to perform a wide array of cell-based screens in human and insect cells studying emerging RNA viruses. The laboratory is interested in emerging and globally important arthropod-borne viruses including the three major families that infect humans: the flaviviruses, alphaviruses and bunyaviruses. We are interested in how these viruses are able to hijack cellular factors from insects to humans for their replication using only a small number of proteins. And how these viruses evade immunity is poorly understood. More recently the lab has expanded their studies to the emerging coronaviruses which have more species and cell type specific tropism. The lab explores how the innate immune system, the first line of defense, can recognize and respond to these invaders. Since much of the recognition of these invaders is at the level of nucleic acid recognition, and these are all RNA viruses, we have been exploring the role of RNA binding proteins and the RNA decay machinery in innate antiviral defense against these viruses. We are systematically exploring antiviral innate signaling activities in diverse cell types targeted by these viruses. For example, in the respiratory epithelium in the case of SARS-CoV-2 and neurons in the case of encephalitic arthropod-borne viruses. Moreover, arthropod-borne viruses infect the vector insect enterically, we use Drosophila to model these intestinal infections to explore the role of microbiota and innate defenses in the gut in the response to enteric arboviral infections.