About this Research Topic
Structural insights from cryogenic electron microscopy (cryo-EM) are revolutionizing medicine discovery and vaccine design for newly emerging pathogens. New infectious diseases periodically emerge and in the wake of recent viral outbreaks, like HIV, COVID-19, Zika, and Ebola, structural virology studies have taken center stage.
There are urgent public health needs to characterize pathogens and viral structures with host reactions in order to identify and develop therapeutics and vaccines. During the SARS-CoV2 pandemic, cryo-EM highlighted how structure-based vaccine design and antibody engineering can lead to positive public health outcomes.
Infectious diseases are a leading cause of illness and death worldwide. Major challenges for infectious disease pathology studies include characterizing the molecular basis of pathogen life cycles and using this information to develop innovative therapeutic and management strategies.
With cryo-EM, researchers may rapidly vitrify a cell, virus, molecular complex, or other structures to preserve samples in their native states. Current cryo-EM developments towards in-situ applications have accelerated structural studies on viral, bacterial, fungal, and parasitic therapeutic targets that mediate host-pathogen interactions by providing cell biological context to the molecular mechanism. These integrated cryo-EM approaches help overcome challenges in studying infectious diseases where purifying viral proteins may be challenging, protein heterogeneity is difficult to understand, and high-resolution structural information of targets cannot be obtained by other structural biological methods.
This Research Topic invites original contributions, methods, and review articles. We want to use structural sciences to improve understanding and treatment outcomes for infectious diseases through basic or translational research.
Areas to be covered in this Research Topic include, but are not limited to:
• Research to combat infectious diseases by using integrated structural biology methods including cryo-EM and complementary techniques.
• Presenting understanding of host-pathogen life cycles from biology.
• How structures of membrane proteins and host cell receptors are therapeutic targets.
• General applications utilizing cryo-EM as a tool on emerging pathogens to assist in rapid vaccine development.
• Understanding biological processes that involve larger, complex, and dynamic protein assemblies that have potential pathogenic activity.
There are urgent public health needs to characterize pathogens and viral structures with host reactions in order to identify and develop therapeutics and vaccines. During the SARS-CoV2 pandemic, cryo-EM highlighted how structure-based vaccine design and antibody engineering can lead to positive public health outcomes.
Infectious diseases are a leading cause of illness and death worldwide. Major challenges for infectious disease pathology studies include characterizing the molecular basis of pathogen life cycles and using this information to develop innovative therapeutic and management strategies.
With cryo-EM, researchers may rapidly vitrify a cell, virus, molecular complex, or other structures to preserve samples in their native states. Current cryo-EM developments towards in-situ applications have accelerated structural studies on viral, bacterial, fungal, and parasitic therapeutic targets that mediate host-pathogen interactions by providing cell biological context to the molecular mechanism. These integrated cryo-EM approaches help overcome challenges in studying infectious diseases where purifying viral proteins may be challenging, protein heterogeneity is difficult to understand, and high-resolution structural information of targets cannot be obtained by other structural biological methods.
This Research Topic invites original contributions, methods, and review articles. We want to use structural sciences to improve understanding and treatment outcomes for infectious diseases through basic or translational research.
Areas to be covered in this Research Topic include, but are not limited to:
• Research to combat infectious diseases by using integrated structural biology methods including cryo-EM and complementary techniques.
• Presenting understanding of host-pathogen life cycles from biology.
• How structures of membrane proteins and host cell receptors are therapeutic targets.
• General applications utilizing cryo-EM as a tool on emerging pathogens to assist in rapid vaccine development.
• Understanding biological processes that involve larger, complex, and dynamic protein assemblies that have potential pathogenic activity.
Keywords: infectious disease, cryo-EM, structural biology, virology, pathology, host-pathogen, membrane proteins, vaccine development, translational research, antibodies
Important Note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.
