Professional Bio
I obtained by undergraduate degree at Nazareth College in Rochester, NY in 1992 with a degree in Biochemistry. As an undergraduate I studied protein expression in Medaka fish. I obtained by Ph.D from the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at the University of Rochester in 1997. I studied the origins of replication human herpesviruses 6 and 7 under the mentorship of Stephen Dewhurst, Ph.D. I then joined the Department of Medicine at the University of Rochester Medical Center where I have worked studying the effects of drug resistance mutations on HIV-1 replication. In addition to my research activities I am also the Director of the Cold Storage Core and the Clinical Processing Laboratory.
Research Bio
Our research group is interested in several projects related to HIV-1 pathogenesis and treatment. We study the effect of anti-retroviral drug resistance mutations on HIV-1 replication capacity and resistance. We are interested in determining whether HIV-1 replication capacity as measured in cell culture is clinically related to HIV-1 pathogenesis. We have experience working with HIV-1 in cell culture and have developed several unique cell culture based assays to study HIV-1 recombination, resistance and fitness. We also have biochemistry expertise, studying the polymerization and RNase H activities of HIV-1 reverse transcriptase.
We have recently shown that some drug resistant mutants grow better in the presence of the inhibitor compared to its absence. Future work will explore possible mechanisms for how this stimulation by drug occurs with the goal to develop more potent drugs for treatment. We have also shown that protease inhibitor drug resistant mutants give discordant fitness when measured in multiple-cycle versus single-cycle fitness assays, indicating that these assays measure different steps of the virus life-cycle. Future work will explore the reasons for this discrepancy using novel technologies such as nanospectroscopy and Amnis Imagestream flow cytometry. The goal is to determine whether fitness as measured in cell culture can correlate with progression to AIDS in patients.
2013 Apr
Zhang X, Tierney C, Albrecht M, Demeter LM, Morse G, DiFrancesco R, Dykes C, Jiang H, Haas DW. "Discordant associations between SLCO1B1 521T?C and plasma levels of ritonavir-boosted protease inhibitors in AIDS clinical trials group study A5146." Therapeutic drug monitoring. 2013 Apr 0; 35(2):209-16. |
2013 Mar 27
Wang J, Li D, Bambara RA, Yang H, Dykes C. "L74V increases the reverse transcriptase content of HIV-1 virions with non-nucleoside reverse transcriptase drug-resistant mutations L100I+K103N and K101E+G190S, which results in increased fitness." The Journal of general virology. 2013 Mar 27; Epub 2013 Mar 27. |
2012 Jun
Block O, Mitra A, Novotny L, Dykes C. "A rapid label-free method for quantitation of human immunodeficiency virus type-1 particles by nanospectroscopy." Journal of virological methods. 2012 Jun 0; 182(1-2):70-5. Epub 2012 Mar 20. |
2011 Oct
Wang J, Zhang G, Bambara RA, Li D, Liang H, Wu H, Smith HM, Lowe NR, Demeter LM, Dykes C. "Nonnucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitor-resistant HIV is stimulated by efavirenz during early stages of infection." Journal of virology. 2011 Oct 0; 85(20):10861-73. Epub 2011 Aug 10. |
2011 Feb 20
Piekna-Przybylska D, Dykes C, Demeter LM, Bambara RA. "Sequences in the U3 region of human immunodeficiency virus 1 improve efficiency of minus strand transfer in infected cells." Virology. 2011 Feb 20; 410(2):368-74. Epub 2010 Dec 30. |
