Melanie Ott, MD, PhD

Senior Investigator, Gladstone Institute of Virology and Immunology

Professor

Department of Medicine

+1 415 734-4807

Research Overview:

We study viruses of today to be prepared for the viruses of tomorrow. Currently, we focus on multiple human pathogens—the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV-1), Zika virus, the hepatitis B and C viruses (HBV and HCV), influenza A and B , SARS-CoV-2 and multiple common cold coronaviruses. We use four main technologies—human organoids, rapid quantitative diagnostics, a viral protein expression library, and transcriptomics. We deliberately apply lessons learned from one virus to others; specifically, we search for common host and viral factors that can be targeted by panviral therapeutics against respiratory viruses, define new ways to silence and cure chronic viral infections such as HIV and HBV and develop versatile, easy to reprogram CRISPR diagnostics that use mobile phones as readers. We welcome graduate students into our diverse and friendly research teams as equal partners and nurture their scientific success and personal growth.

Primary Thematic Area:

Virology & Microbial Pathogenesis

Secondary Thematic Area:

Immunology

Research Summary:

Molecular Pathogenesis of HIV and Hepatitis C Virus Infections

Websites

Publications:

NF-κB inhibitor alpha controls SARS-CoV-2 infection in ACE2-overexpressing human airway organoids.

Scientific reports

Simoneau CR, Chen PY, Xing GK, Hayashi JM, Chen IP, Khalid MM, Meyers NL, Taha TY, Leon KE, Suryawanshi RK, McCavitt-Malvido M, Ashuach T, Fontaine KA, Rodriguez L, Joehnk B, Walcott K, Vasudevan S, Fang X, Maishan M, Schultz S, Roose JP, Matthay MA, Sil A, Arjomandi M, Yosef N, Ott M

Colloidal Aggregation Confounds Cell-Based Covid-19 Antiviral Screens.

Journal of medicinal chemistry

Glenn IS, Hall LN, Khalid MM, Ott M, Shoichet BK

Assembly of SARS-CoV-2 nucleocapsid protein with nucleic acid.

Nucleic acids research

Zhao H, Syed AM, Khalid MM, Nguyen A, Ciling A, Wu D, Yau WM, Srinivasan S, Esposito D, Doudna JA, Piszczek G, Ott M, Schuck P

CRISPR-Cas9 screen of E3 ubiquitin ligases identifies TRAF2 and UHRF1 as regulators of HIV latency in primary human T cells.

mBio

Rathore U, Haas P, Easwar Kumar V, Hiatt J, Haas KM, Bouhaddou M, Swaney DL, Stevenson E, Zuliani-Alvarez L, McGregor MJ, Turner-Groth A, Ochieng' Olwal C, Bediako Y, Braberg H, Soucheray M, Ott M, Eckhardt M, Hultquist JF, Marson A, Kaake RM, Krogan NJ

De novo-designed minibinders expand the synthetic biology sensing repertoire.

bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology

Weinberg ZY, Soliman SS, Kim MS, Chen IP, Ott M, El-Samad H

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