Profs. Ileana Cristea and Jared Toettcher have been named 2024 Paul Allen Distinguished Investigators and will receive funding to support their research efforts toward understanding "intra- and inter-cellular communication driven by membrane contact sites within a virus microenvironment."

Based on ongoing work in the Cristea laboratory, this project is focused on a still under-explored area of virology, aiming to characterize how organelle remodeling events drive intra- and inter-cellular communication within a virus microenvironment. For this multidisciplinary research endeavor, Dr. Cristea recruited as collaborators three Princeton faculty members, Jared Toettcher as co-PI, and Britt Adamson and John Jimah as collaborators.

The announcement states that these investigators have shown that viruses can alter organelle connections in a host’s cells, forcing infected cells to prime their neighbors to become more susceptible to infection. In this project, they will determine the underlying causes and consequences of this virus-induced organelle network reorganization by developing novel tools to monitor and manipulate organelle connections in cells at varying distances from viral infection sites. The approaches they develop can be extended to a multitude of biological contexts and will expand our understanding of inter- and intra-cell interactions and immunity.

Read the official award announcement.