Unit Head: Dr Béatrice Nal-Rogier
Lab Members: Dr François Kien, Dr Dong-Jiang Tang, Dr Pei Gang Wang, Ms Kid Chu, Ms Jane Tse, Mr Mateusz Kudelko, Mr Kevin Kwok, Mr Patrick Lam, Mr Robin Lee, Mr Jean Millet, Mr Lewis Sui, and Mr Kim Tat Teoh

Virus-Host Interactions
During million of years of co-evolution, viruses and host cells have adapted themselves to each-others. On the one hand, viruses are clever cell biologists and have developed amazing strategies to exploit cellular machineries like vesicular and protein trafficking, biosynthesis and sorting machineries. On the other hand cells have reacted to viral invasions by developing innate defence mechanisms and by expressing restriction factors for viral replication. The understanding of cross-talk processes between viruses and host cells is a must to identify new targets for future antiviral therapeutic approaches.

Cellular "Interactomes" for viral structural proteins
In order to identify new cellular factors able to enhance or restrict early (entry) and late (assembly and budding) stages of viral infections large-scale genomic approaches like yeast-2-hybrid (Y2H) and siRNA library screens are used. A particular interest is given to Dengue virus, Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza H5N1 and SARS-CoV. For this latter, we have identified several cellular factor candidates which may regulate the infection.