Adam Lauring
University of Michigan, MI·Microbiology & Immunology
Influenza spreads from person to person, and it mutates as it goes. Both facts make it hard to control: vaccines lose their match, drugs lose their power, and new strains appear.
- Fields
Microbiology & Immunology
Public Health & Epidemiology
Genetics
- Topics
influenza
viral transmission
household cohort study
- Grants
- 4 known grants, through Jun 2031
What they work on
- Test how viral shedding dynamics and coinfection with other respiratory pathogens relate to the risk of passing influenza to a household member, using data- and specimen-rich observational cohorts of human-to-human transmission.
- Define how the specificity of antibody and T-cell responses to influenza surface glycoproteins shapes both infectiousness and susceptibility, drawing on specimens banked across a 15-year household study.
- Model the contributions of environmental conditions and human behavior to influenza transmission by combining data from three separate household studies.
- Build shared resources for the field: a protocol toolkit for household transmission studies, an annotated human specimen biorepository, and transmission models packaged as executable R software.
- Quantify how temperature, humidity, droplet size and droplet content affect influenza viability with a new instrument, and develop a fluorescence-based device to measure the acidity of respiratory droplets over time.
- Determine the trade-off between replication speed and copying accuracy across 50 years of H3N2 influenza evolution, using competition assays and fluctuation tests on adaptive mutations in PB1, the polymerase subunit that copies viral RNA.
- Measure the effect of every amino acid substitution in the influenza RNA polymerase PB1 protein on replication and mutation rate, using deep mutational scanning with serial passage with and without mutagenic nucleosides.
- Dissect how co-selected amino acid interactions among the PB2, PB1 and PA polymerase subunits set the viral mutation rate, combining molecular dynamics modeling with in vitro polymerase assays.
- Identify genomic changes in SARS-CoV-2, respiratory syncytial virus and influenza that raise intrinsic transmissibility or allow escape from neutralizing antibodies, using genomic surveillance plus high-throughput phenotyping.
- Find the genetic determinants that let the emerging fungus Candida auris colonize skin and hospital surfaces, using whole-genome sequencing, microbial genome-wide association, and functional genomic screens.
More about the research
Laboratory animals and cell cultures let researchers control one variable at a time, but what they show does not always carry over to how flu actually moves between people in homes, schools and workplaces. Work here spans both ends of that gap, from household studies that track real transmission events to molecular experiments on the virus's copying machinery, plus a broader program applying genome sequencing to viral, bacterial, fungal and parasitic pathogens to ask what makes some strains spread while others fade.
Why it matters
Understanding which viral, behavioral, environmental and immune factors drive flu transmission in households could point to practical ways to interrupt respiratory virus spread. Mapping how and why influenza mutates may improve prediction of which strains will emerge and guide design of antiviral drugs the virus cannot easily escape. Across bacteria, fungi and parasites, linking genome differences to transmission, drug resistance and virulence could sharpen risk assessment and countermeasures for infectious disease.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Hillel Haim
University of Iowa, IA·Microbiology & Immunology
Build a deep mutational scanning system using replication-defective HIV-1 to measure, safely and at high throughput, how every amino acid substitution at each site of the capsid protein affects viral fitness and resistance to the capsid inhibitor lenacapavir.
Cheng Huang
University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston, TX·Microbiology & Immunology
Determine in animal models whether disabling the nucleoprotein's DEDDh exoribonuclease motif, which trims RNA, increases mutation in the Lassa virus genome, raises production of non-standard genome copies, and changes how severe infection becomes.
Marco Salemi
University of Florida, FL·Public Health & Epidemiology
Test whether SARS-CoV-2 evolves faster within immunocompromised people with HIV by using phylodynamic analysis, which reconstructs viral family trees from genetic sequences, to track variants that arise inside one person.
The school
University of Michigan: 124 labs on PI Pages, $2.1B a year on research, 963 research doctorates a year.
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