Rob Unckless, PhD

Rob Unckless, PhD

Associate Professor, Molecular Biosciences
Director of the KU Center for Genomics

 

Rob Unckless grew up in Rochester, NY and began his career as a high school teacher. After seven years of teaching, he enrolled in a PhD program at the University of Rochester and graduated in 2011. Unckless then worked as a postdoc at Cornell University until starting his faculty position at the University of Kansas, Lawrence in 2016. He is currently Associate Professor in Molecular Biosciences and Director of the KU Center for Genomics. His lab focuses on the genomic and evolutionary consequences of conflict within and between genomes.

Viral Infection Dynamics at Single Cell Resolution

Our ability to understand innate immunity at the whole organism or even whole tissue level has been hampered by our inability to study immune responses and infection dynamics in the context of variation among cell types. For viruses, different cell types are likely differentially suitable for infection. Our knowledge of specific cell type tropism is also often quite poor. Model systems (Drosophila, Caenorhabditis) allow for studies of infection dynamics, are inexpensive and lack ethical considerations present for vertebrates. Furthermore, single-cell RNA sequencing approaches provide an unprecedented view of variation in cell types even within individual tissues. Many laboratory stocks of Drosophila are chronically infected with one or more viruses, which means that any single-cell RNA sequencing experiment using those lines has a built-in infection experiment that the original researchers ignored or did not know about. We reanalyzed single cell RNA-sequencing data from the Drosophila fat body (akin to the liver) and measured tropism, differential gene expression at the cellular level. We also used this data to predict host membrane proteins used for viral entry into cells. Our results provide considerable insight into how viruses infect host cells and the host transcriptional response to those infections.