Dr. Pipas received his Ph.D. in 1975 with Robert Reeves at Florida State University, performed postdoctoral studies with John Wilson at Baylor College and with Dan Nathans at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, and joined the Department in 1980.
Viral Manipulation of Cellular Systems
BKV and JCV are human polyomavirus that infect and persist in most humans for a lifetime. These infections are usually harmless. However, both viruses can cause severe, even fatal, diseases in immunocompromised individuals. Little is known of the factors that suppress the replication of BKV and JCV in most individuals, nor of the specific mechanisms by which these viruses escape suppression during productive infection. We are exploring these mechanisms by comparing infections of primary human cell types that allow robust viral replication with those in which viral infection is restricted.
Viral Metagenomics and the Panviral Proteome
Viruses are everywhere. Every organism on Earth harbors viruses as components of their microbiome, or as transiently acquired infections. The diversity of known viruses is staggering in terms of structure, genome architecture, and strategies of replication and spread. New types of viruses are constantly emerging either due to host jumping, or to mutation and/or recombination of viruses within hosts. Yet little is known of the distribution of viruses in their natural environments, nor of the movement of viruses within and across species in the wild. We are developing molecular and computational tools for exploring viral diversity, surveilling viruses in nature, and understanding the factors that favor or restrict viral spread. We have developed powerful computational tools for detecting viruses in NGS sequence databases and characterizing the proteins they encode. Currently we are developing strategies to apply these methods to relatively large scale ecosystems.