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Rui (Ray)  Lu

Assistant Professor

Area of interest

The major focus of my research is to understand the mechanism of a novel antiviral immunity mediated by RNA interference (RNAi) RNAi is a eukaryotic gene regulation mechanism that controls a wide variety of biological functions through silencing gene expression at transcriptional or posttranscriptional level. One of the major biological functions of RNAi is antiviral which has been established as a major antiviral defense in a broad spectrum of organism species such as fungi, plants, worms and insects. As a cytosolic antiviral mechanism, RNAi targets viral RNA for destruction in a virus sequence specific manner.

RNAi-mediated antiviral immunity is potent and specific thus holds the promise for developing novel antiviral means important for human health and economically important crop species. Functional study of known antiviral RNAi genes has greatly improved our understanding of the core mechanism of antiviral RNAi. Yet we are still being challenged by many important questions as to how RNAi machinery senses and subsequently wipes out the invading viruses and how antiviral RNAi genes themselves are regulated in response to virus attack. To address these questions we have developed a C. elegans worm system for the study of RNAi mediated antiviral immunity using genetic approaches. Ongoing projects in my lab include:

1) Genetic screens to look for novel worm genes involved in RNAi mediated antiviral immunity.

2) Function mechanism study of known antiviral RNAi genes towards understanding how invading  viruses are recognized and destroyed by RNAi machinery.

Contact information

Department of Biological Sciences
202 Life Science Building
Louisiana State University
Baton Rouge, LA 70803
Phone: 225-578-5973 (Lab)
            225-578-7962 (Office)                                             Email: ruilu@lsu.edu                                                            Office: 374 Life Science Building                                         Lab:  A301 Life Science Building Annex

 Education

Postdoc   2003-2008  University of California, Riverside.       Supervisor: Dr. Shouwei Ding

PhD        1999-2003   The Sainsbury Laboratory, John Innes Center, Norwich, United Kingdom. Supervisor: David Baulcombe, FRS

BSc         1991        Wuhan University. Wuhan, China

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