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Research Interests:
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Our laboratory is undertaking basic research on the development of vaccines against the flavivirus diseases. This includes West Nile, Japanese encephalitis, yellow fever and dengue. We undertake studies on the excellent yellow fever 17D vaccine as a model to understand the molecular basis of attenuation of this vaccine. This is of major importance as the 17D vaccine virus is being used as an attenuated backbone to generate chimeric vaccine viruses against other flavivirus diseases, including dengue and Japanese encephalitis. We are also studying the molecular basis of reversion to neurovirulence of this vaccine virus. In addition, Recombinant DNA technology and infectious clone technology/reverse genetics are being used to identify molecular determinants of virulence of West Nile and Japanese encephalitis viruses with the aim of mutating these virulence determinants to develop candidate attenuated vaccine strains.
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