Sara Sawyer

Flaviviruses such as dengue encode a protease that is essential for viral replication. The protease functions by cleaving well-conserved positions in the viral polyprotein. In addition to the viral polyprotein, the dengue protease cleaves at least one host protein involved in immune response. This raises the question, what other host...

Historically, the evolution of bats has been analyzed using a small number of genetic loci for many species or many genetic loci for a few species. Here we present a phylogeny of 18 bat species, each of which is represented in 1,107 orthologous gene alignments used to build the tree...

Pandemic HIV-1 (group M) emerged following the cross-species transmission of a simian immunodeficiency virus from chimpanzees (SIVcpz) to humans. Primate lentiviruses (HIV/SIV) require the T cell receptor CD4 to enter into target cells. By surveying the sequence and function of CD4 in 50 chimpanzee individuals, we find that all chimpanzee...

RNA viruses are a major source of emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases around the world. We developed a method to identify RNA viruses that is based on the fact that RNA viruses produce double-stranded RNA (dsRNA) while replicating. Purifying and sequencing dsRNA from the total RNA isolated from infected tissue...

Sawyer Lab, BioFrontiers Institute, University of Colorado Boulder University of Colorado Boulder researchers studying virus spillover have uncovered a clue explaining why dengue viruses reach high concentrations in humans, but not in primates, their presumed natural source. The work was performed by the lab of Dr. Sara Sawyer at the...

NIH’s awards support groundbreaking approaches to HIV prevention and treatment With diverse proposals focused on everything from natural killer cells to therapeutic vaccines to treat HIV, three recipients have been selected for the 2018 Avant-Garde Award for HIV/AIDS Research from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), part of the...

Sawyer Lab, BioFrontiers Institute, University of Colorado Boulder University of Colorado Boulder researchers studying the emergence of viruses from wildlife populations provide a key clue to how simian immunodeficiency virus emerged from monkeys, ultimately starting the HIV-1 pandemic in humans. “These new observations show that differences in the RanBP2 gene...

For billions of years, the battle between cells and viruses has been a primary driver of evolution. University of Colorado Boulder researcher Dr. Sara Sawyer has dedicated her career to this relationship, combining methods from virology and molecular evolution to investigate emerging human and animal viruses. Sawyer, an Associate Professor...

Just as flu season swings into full gear, researchers from the University of Colorado Boulder and University of Texas at Austin have uncovered a previously unknown mechanism by which the human immune system tries to battle the influenza A virus. The discovery sheds new light on how the virus —...