Bunyaviral polymerases – structures, mechanisms, and inhibition

Piotr Gerlach did his PhD in Stephen Cusack’s group at EMBL in Grenoble, where he worked on the first atomic structure of a bunyaviral polymerase. He later joined Elena Conti’s lab at MPIB in Munich, where he was using cryo-EM to study human nuclear RNA exosome and its adaptor complex NEXT. Currently, he runs the Laboratory of Structural Virology at IMol PAS, which uses cell culture experiments along with molecular and structural biology approaches to study bunyaviral mechanism – focusing on features and functioning of the vRNP machinery, virus–host interactions involved in regulating viral transcription and translation, as well as impact of the orthobunyaviral infection on cellular proteomes, host translation and transcription machineries. He is a recipient of EMBO-IG, NSC Sonata Bis, and FNP First Team grants.