Marc Johnson
Assistant Professor
Molecular Microbiology & Immunology

Research:
Retrovirus assembly

Retroviral assembly is an elegant biological process that involves multiple viral and cellular actors from diverse locations within the cell converging at defined assembly sites to create and facilitate the egress of an infectious viral particle. I utilize the model retrovirus HIV-1 to study how the basic viral components (proteins, glycoproteins, and RNAs) are targeted to viral assembly sites and how cellular processes are usurped to aid in this process. A combination of novel fluorescence and scanning electron microscopy techniques are utilized to better understand how these complex processes take place.