Project 466681

The Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) is a widespread virus that infects nearly all adults worldwide. Infection is life-long, as the virus hides within the bodys immune cells and is skilful at escaping detection. EBV is the cause of infectious mononucleosis and is also known to cause many different cancers, potentially up to 1 out of 100 cancer cases worldwide. Unfortunately, it is still not fully understood exactly how EBV persists for so long or causes disease or cancer. The key to understanding (and then preventing) EBV-related diseases lies within identifying the many different EBV proteins, understanding how they work, and finding out how they manipulate the proteins and cells of the human host. We have recently discovered that one EBV protein binds a certain protein complex, called CCR4NOT, that is present in human cells. CCR4NOT plays an essential role in determining which proteins are expressed in the cell. We hypothesize that EBV may be hijacking CCR4NOT, to control which proteins are expressed. Many viruses are known to cause a decrease in the host cells protein expression, in order to prioritize expression of their own proteins, so we think that EBV may be doing this by controlling CCR4NOT. Our experiments will investigate this occurrence further, to better understand the interaction between the EBV protein and CCR4NOT, and to see how this interaction affects protein expression within the cell. Ultimately, we aim to understand whether this interaction plays a role in EBV infection, EBV-caused diseases, and EBV-related cancer.