Congrats to Seth Frietze, PhD of the University of Vermont for winning an NIH grant to study ciHHV-6. Dr. Frietze and his team have developed a system to study HHV-6 latency and will observe the differential gene expression during viral integration as well as during HHV-6 reactivation in response to triggering drugs such as HDAC inhibitors. They hypothesize that virus reactivating cells will have a characteristic gene expression in response to drug treatment, and will use state of the art tools to document cellular and viral genes that participate in the maintenance of latency and reactivation. They will sort the reactivated cells after HDACi treatment and study the subsets individually to better understand why only a fraction of these cells reactivate. Dr. Frietze will be collaborating with Dr. Benedikt Kaufer in Berlin.
