Department of Infectious Diseases, Department of Population Health, Poultry Diagnostic and Research Center
Associate Professor, Joint Faculty
Expertise
Cell Culture | Infectious Diseases | Microbiology | Pathogenesis | Vector Biology | Vector-Borne Diseases | Virology | Zoonotic Diseases
Biography
Dr. Melinda Brindley is a molecular virologist, with expertise in positive and negative sense RNA viruses. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of Iowa studying how Ebola virus and equine infectious anemia virus enters host cells. As a postdoc at Emory University, she characterized how the measles virus glycoprotein fusion complex is formed, triggered, and refold to start the infection process. She joined the University of Georgia in 2014, studying how the Lassa virus glycoprotein interacts with receptors and exploring how Zika virus transmission is affected by environmental temperature. Current projects in her lab continue to explore how enveloped viruses use cellular lipids to enter and exit cells and characterize mutations that make Zika virus able to replicate in suboptimal conditions.
Research Interests
- Understanding how viruses alter/require cellular lipids for replication and assembly
- Defining specific lipids within viral envelopes and how they alter infectivity
- Determining how environmental temperature alters arboviral replication and transmission
- Characterizing how enveloped viruses enter and fuse with host cells
- Making VSV-based molecular tools to monitor entry of high-containment pathogens
Selected Publications
