COVID19 WINNER Dance Your PhD 2021: Biochemical & Biophysical Studies of the COVID-19 N Protein

Biochemical & Biophysical Studies of the COVID-19 Nucleocapsid Protein with RNA This video describes the PhD research of Heather Masson-Forsythe as a part of the Barbar Lab in the Biochemistry & Biophysics department of Oregon State University. The COVID-19 disease caused by SARS-CoV-2 has, within a period of only a year, infected more than 88 million people resulting in over 1.9 million deaths worldwide, as of January 2021, and the numbers are still growing. There is an urgent need to accelerate research into the mechanisms of virus infection, transmission and control. Even with vaccines becoming available, we face hurdles of viral mutation, difficulties in vaccine distribution, misinformation, and a public fearful of new vaccines and treatments. The work presented here focuses on one of the essential proteins encoded in the viral genome, the Nucleocapsid protein (N), which plays critical roles in multiple processes of the infection cycle, including protecting and packaging viral RNA as a virus is assemble