The simple yet effective molecular machinery of viruses can cause devastating disease, but it also offers critical clues about the fundamental principles that govern all life, says Shira Weingarten-Gabbay, who joined the Blavatnik Institute at Harvard Medical School as an assistant professor of microbiology in January 2025.
- By JAKE MILLER
Weingarten-Gabbay leads the new Laboratory of Systems Virology, where her team works at the intersection of virology, immunology, and systems biology to better understand the inner workings of viruses and their interaction with the immune system and apply that understanding toward preventing current and future viral diseases.
For instance, lab members are developing methods that can interrogate the genomes of hundreds of viruses simultaneously to help determine how viruses interact with their hosts.
With a multidisciplinary background in molecular genetics, bioinformatics, and systems biology, Weingarten-Gabbay joined HMS following postdoctoral fellowships in virology in the laboratories of Pardis Sabeti at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and Charles Rice at The Rockefeller University. Her research has received federal and philanthropic funding support.
Harvard Medicine News spoke to Weingarten-Gabbay about the secrets you can learn from viruses' tiny proteins.
Harvard Medicine News: What drives your interest in viruses?
Weingarten-Gabbay: Viruses are among the most fascinating entities on Earth. With a genetic code that is 10,000 times smaller than ours, they can get into our bodies, defeat our immune systems, take over the machinery of our cells, and make our biological factories work for them to infect new cells and, eventually, new hosts.
A lot of the biological tricks that we learned in the last few decades - really important additions to our fundamental understanding of biology, like how cells produce proteins - were initially discovered in viruses. But viruses are also important in their own right because of the great harm they can cause.
The goal of my research is to understand how viruses do all the remarkable things that they do and to use that knowledge to prevent disease.
HMNews: Why are these tiny proteins so important?
Weingarten-Gabbay: Over the past decade, our understanding of the coding potential of genomes has been revolutionized with the revealing of a whole universe of microproteins.
We find the genetic codes for these microproteins in human cells, cancer cells, bacteria, and yeast, and they also appear in DNA and RNA viruses.
We call this particularly mysterious group of proteins the dark proteome.
