peopleJennie Lavine
Graduate Student
Email: jsl236@psu.edu
Phone: 814-865-1030
Fax: 814-865-9131
Office: 510 Mueller Laboratory
Research
1) Using ecological statistical techniques for analyzing large innate immunity datasets
I am analyzing cytokine data collected from experimental infections of lab cats with a virulent strain of FIV and a non-pathogenic strain of PLV, a cougar virus. Interestingly, cats that are infected with PLV before FIV do not develop disease. We hypothesize that the cytokine response is important in conferring this protection against disease.
The biological questions we are addressing include:
- Which cytokines are important in protecting against disease?
- At what time post infection can you see the protective effect?
- Does viral strain affect the immune profile and reaction to second infection?
We are attempting to answer these questions using statistical techniques common to ecology, such as principal component analysis and linear discriminant analysis.
2) Impact of viruses on host genetic heterogeneity
We are looking at the impact of pathogens, particularly viruses, on the maintenance of polymorphisms in innate immunity-related genes in vertebrate populations.
Through computer simulations and in-vitro cell culture experiments, we will be testing for frequency dependent selection by a range of diverse viral populations. We will also consider:
- How viral strategy — i.e. typically acute viruses, compared with persistent viruses — affects the maintenance of diversity through frequency-dependent selection.
- How non-homogeneously mixed populations with specific spatial structure may contribute to the maintenance of diversity. We will explore this in computer-generated models, cell culture experiments and eventually (hopefully) real vertebrate populations in their natural setting, perhaps even Homo sapiens sapiens.