Our Science – Ott Website

David E. Ott, Ph.D.

AIDS and Cancer Virus Program Head, Retroviral Assembly Section Senior Investigator (Contr) SAIC-Frederick, Inc. NCI-Frederick Building 535, Suite 415/433 Frederick, MD 21702-1201 Phone:   301-846-5723/5986 Fax:   301-846-7119 E-Mail:   ott@ncifcrf.gov

Biography

Dr. Ott received his Ph.D. in molecular biology in 1987 from the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He began studying retroviruses as a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Dr. Alan Rein at the NCI-Frederick. After working on retroviral-mediated human gene therapy in private industry, Dr. Ott joined the AIDS Vaccine Program in 1993 and was named the head of the Retroviral Assembly Section in 1999.

Research

The Retroviral Assembly Laboratory seeks to understand retroviral assembly from the perspective of both the virus and the cell. While viral proteins can assemble into particles in vitro, cellular proteins also play a role in viral assembly and infection. Using molecular biology, protein chemistry, mass spectroscopy, and cell biology methods, we are examining the assembly of both wild-type and mutant viruses and virus-associated cellular proteins to better understand the assembly process and viral replication.

For these studies, we isolate and identify the host proteins present both inside and on the surface of HIV-1 virions to obtain clues about virus-cell interactions. One obstacle to these studies is the presence of proteins that contaminate even highly purified virion preparations. We have developed complementary methods to remove these irrelevant proteins so that we can examine the cellular proteins both on the surface and inside virus particles. This allows for the biochemical and proteomic analysis of highly pure HIV-1 virions. Our results have found many cellular proteins in and on HIV-1 particles, some with potential roles in the viral replication cycle. Therefore, we are currently using molecular biology and cell biology methods to examine the interactions of these proteins with HIV-1, especially those that affect assembly. These are complemented by site-directed mutagenesis and fluorescence imaging studies of the assembling HIV-1 proteins.

An additional project seeks to use retroviruses as tools to immortalize specific primary cells, while maintaining primary cell phenotypes. As an initial model, we are immortalizing antigen-specific T cells from human blood.

Key collaborators with our Section are Markus Thali Univ. Vermont, Eric Freed, NCI, and Ulrich Schubert, Univ. Erlangen, Germany.

This page was last updated on 7/23/2008.