News:

November 2025: Collaborative paper with Katya Heldwein’s lab on the importance of the ER protein CLCC1 in herpesvirus replication is now published in Nature Communications! What’s cool is that they noticed that some herpesviruses encoded a gene that looks like host CLCC1, so they can encode their own copy of the proviral host protein. Isabel Mejia in the lab helped show there were at least three instances of herpesvirus lineages “stealing” this gene from hosts, which is another fascinating case of horizontal gene transfer between hosts and microbes. Another really fun collaboration!

November 2025: Dustin’s paper on innate immune recognition of short 5’ UTRs as a “non-self” mRNA pattern is now published in Nature Microbiology! This has been a fun story to pull apart, starting with finding that two ISGs (IFIT2 and IFIT3) have potent antiviral activity against VSV. From there, we worked with Brian Cook, Kevin Corbett and Mark Herzik to determining the IFIT2-IFIT3 heterodimer structure by cryo-EM and worked with Eric Van Nostrand and Gene Yeo to map that the IFIT2-IFIT3 complex binds to the 5’ UTR of VSV mRNAs. The mapping was the key to discovering that IFIT2-IFIT3 is able to selectively inhibit translation of mRNAs that have short (<50 nt) 5’ UTRs. This is exciting, since many viral mRNAs (but few host transcripts) have short 5’ UTRs, which makes this a new molecular pattern that can distinguish non-self from self mRNAs, and allowed Dustin to extend IFIT2-IFIT3 antiviral activity to many more viruses. This one truly took a village; many Daugherty lab members (current, rotation students, and alumni) and a number of important collaborators teamed up to make this possible. Congrats to all!

June 2025: Liz and Sofia head into the next step in their careers. Liz leaves to start a job as an Assistant Teaching Professor at University of Minnesota and Sofia is off to the MCB PhD program at UC Berkeley. Congrats and best of luck to you both!

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