UC Santa Cruz

This research focuses on three primary topics: (1) the development of biolayer interferometry serology tests to detect viral antigen reactivity with microliter scale human serum samples; (2) characterization of targets and epitopes for antibody-based cancer therapeutics with an emphasis on immune checkpoint regulation of natural killer cells via KIR receptors; and (3) preliminary investigation of the human astrovirus 1 RNA-dependent-RNA-polymerase.

BLI-ISA: The biolayer interferometry based antibody test (BLI-ISA) represents a novel, high throughput platform with numerous advantages over conventional enzyme-linked immunosorbent assays (ELISA) in terms of sample requirements, labor, and overall assay time while maintaining high accuracy. Compared to the COV2T antibody test for SARS-CoV-2, BLI-ISA had 94\% positive percent agreement and >98\% negative percent agreement in detection of serum IgG reactivity to viral antigen. The BLI-ISA antibody test is readily adaptable to new antigens, and was quickly deployed to assess reactivity to a panel of eight human astrovirus serotypes with good agreement to studies using more laborious methods.

Antibody therapeutics for cancer: a comparison of bioinformatic methods for the identification of tumor surface markers using RNAseq reveals statistical methods like DESeq outperform some dimensionality reduction techniques like PCA. Then, the epitope of an immune checkpoint inhibitor antibody is characterized by X-ray crystallography in the context of KIR receptor variants, highlighting the importance of population-wide polymorphism analysis.

HAstV RdRp: expression methods for this under-studied polymerase were developed to aid future structural work and activity assays.