Rhinovirus Genomics

Infection with human Rhinovirus (HRV) causes ~50% of the asthma and COPD exacerbations. There are >100 distinct HRV strains, and we feel that HRV genomic variation represents a missing piece of the asthma puzzle in terms of pathogenesis and treatment. To close this gap, we sequenced the full genomes of all known HRV serotypes. Using crystal structure superimposition and RNA minimal energy conformation modeling we then established what we refer to as a “structure-based” alignment of the RNA and amino acid sequences. This effort led to the first phylogenetic tree of the reference HRV set based on full genomes, and several unsuspected findings regarding HRV structure/function, potential anti-viral therapy, evolution and recombination.

See Science 324:55-59, 2009, for the initial publication of our findings. The data generated from these efforts can be found in the DATA section on our HOME page. Our continuing efforts include genomic sequencing of HRV from respiratory samples, correlating HRV genomic content to clinical phenotype (see http://international-rhinovirus-consortium.org/).