Wesley I. Sundquist
University of Utah
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Primary Section: 21, Biochemistry Membership Type:
Member
(elected 2014)
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Biosketch
Wes Sundquist is Benning Professor and Co-Chair of Biochemistry at the University of Utah School of Medicine. Sundquist is a biochemist recognized for his work on HIV assembly, virus-host interactions and the Endosomal Sorting Complexes Required for Transport (ESCRT) pathway. He is known particularly for defining the structure of the HIV capsid and for demonstrating that HIV and other enveloped viruses usurp the ESCRT pathway to bud from cells. Sundquist was born in St. Paul, Minnesota in 1959 and grew up in St. Paul and Washington, DC He graduated from Carleton College, Northfield, Minnesota with a degree in chemistry and from Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a PhD in chemistry (with Steve Lippard). He was postdoctoral fellow at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, in Cambridge, England (with Aaron Klug) and joined the faculty in the Biochemistry Department at the University of Utah in 1992. He has received a Searle Scholars Award, the ASBMB Amgen Award for the Application of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology to the Understanding of Disease, the Bernard Fields Award for Retrovirology, and a Distinguished Alumnus Award from Carleton College. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences.
Research Interests
Wes Sundquist's laboratory studies the molecular and structural biology of retroviruses, with particular emphasis on the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV). Projects in the laboratory focus on understanding the architecture and assembly of the viral particle, the mechanisms of intrinsic host cell defenses, and the process of virus budding. The laboratory also studies the cellular roles of the ESCRT pathway in the cytokinesis and its regulation by the abscission checkpoint. We are particularly interested in understanding how the ESCRT machinery catalyzes the membrane fission reactions required for virus budding and cell division. Experimental approaches include NMR, EM, and crystallographic studies of viral complexes, biochemical analyses of the interactions between viral components and their cellular partners, and genetic and cell biological studies of protein functions.
