International prize for Wageningen PhD student Stineke van Houte

She was awarded this highest accolade for PhD students by the Society of Invertebrate Pathology for her research into the remarkable behavioural changes displayed by insects infected with a virus. The prize is worth a thousand dollars.

Stineke van Houte is a PhD student in the Laboratory for Virology at Wageningen University, part of Wageningen UR. She presented her research, which she set up together with colleague Vera Ros and Associate Professor Monique van Oers, during the 45th annual meeting of the international Society of Invertebrate Pathology, this year held in Argentina.

Stineke van Houte concentrated her research on the phenomenon that parasites, including viruses, influence the behaviour of their host thereby increasing their chances of being spread. A good example would be the aggressive behaviour of a rabid dog; biting other animals increases the chance of infecting them with the rabies virus.

Stineke van Houte and her colleagues are focusing their research in the Laboratory for Virology on the baculovirus family. When infected with one of these viruses, caterpillars display hypermobility, i.e. they are much livelier and faster in covering large distances than caterpillars that are not infected. This ensures that the virus is spread over a larger area.

There is currently very little scientific information about the underlying mechanism for this behavioural manipulation. Stineke van Houte used the AcMNPV baculovirus as a model to reveal the viral gene responsible. She constructed various viruses (mutants) in the lab and tested them in specially-designed test surroundings (the arena), which enabled her to register and measure the caterpillars’ movements.

The virus gene concerned encodes for an enzyme that can regulate the activity of other proteins. If this gene is removed or replaced with a variant that has been deactivated, the infected caterpillars show no signs of hypermobility. The next step in her research will be to discover which protein in the cell the enzyme is targeting, and how the signal from the virus is translated into behaviour by the host.

The Society for Invertebrate Pathology (SIP) was founded in 1967. The 45th annual meeting is held from 5 to 9 August.

Note

More information is available from Monique van Oers, via monique.vanoers@wur.nl or from Jac Niessen, scientific information officer at Wageningen UR, tel. +31 (0)317 485003, jac.niessen@wur.nl. See also http://www.sipweb.org/ (SIP) and http://www.sipweb.org/SIP2012/index.html (annual meeting).