Prof. Dr. Urs Greber
Department of Molecular Life Sciences
University of Zurich
Winterthurerstrasse 190
CH-8057 Zurich
Switzerland
Building / Room: Y11-F-11
Phone: +41 44 635 48 41
A personal statement
Why do I work with viruses? The quick answer is because viruses are so interesting. Viruses infect all cells and living beings on the planet, and have been in us ever since. Yet we do not know enough about them, especially, lacking crucial knowledge how infection changes host cells, and how this causes disease.
In the course of my studies of Experimental Biology at ETH Zürich in Switzerland, I became fascinated with the question how do normal cells work. During my doctoral and postdoctoral work at ETH and in the US, I developed procedures to better understand how eukaryotic cells receive cues from the outside, and transmit information to the cytoplasm and the nucleus, for example impacting on gene regulation. Together with a dedicated team of students and scientists, we have explored this question by using viruses, and studying how they deliver their genes into the cell nucleus. We have recently extended the work to explore how a DNA virus, adenovirus, replicates and produces progeny in the nucleus, and controls its egress from infected cells along a lytic or a nonlytic pathway.
Over the years, we have developed and applied a range of microscopy approaches to visualize viruses in living cells, and to intercept infections with chemical and genetic methods directed against the virus or the cell. From such experiments, we derive rules and make predictions by using algorithms, numerical models and statistics. We subject the findings to further analyses in primary cells and reconstituted tissues, and thereby refine our understanding of virus infection mechanisms.