Home Department: Biology
Mentor: Shirit Einav, Medicine (Infectious Diseases) and Microbiology & Immunology

Severe dengue is a major global health threat, but transcriptomics studies based on bulk samples and/or single cohorts have not yielded gene setsthat are reliably predictiveof progression from infection to severe dengue. Avery will study the transcriptional dynamics of dengue virus infection by using a recently developed approach, virus-inclusive single-cell RNA-Seq, on single human peripheral blood monocyte cells. With this method, she hopes to decipher the roles of individual genes from a 20-gene set that has been validated as predictive of severe dengue. This work could contribute to the understanding of dengue pathogenesis and advance the development of a dengue prognostic assay.