Biography: Maarit Suomalainen has a MSci in Genetics from Helsinki and Doctorate from the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm. Since 2009 she has been a senior scientist in the Department of Molecular life sciences, University of Zurich.
Topic: Virus infections have variable efficiencies at a single-cell level, but the underlying mechanisms are poorly understood. We have developed image-based single-cell measurements to study the cell-to-cell heterogeneity in the human Adenovirus (AdV) infection and identified the start of virus gene expression as a major restriction point for productive AdV infection in iPSC-derived macrophages. These results reinforce the view that the initial host cell state has a major impact on outcome of a virus infection.
