Dr Alex Borodavka

The Unit's Affiliated Memberships aim to facilitate or enhance long-term collaborations between scientists and experts from across the world with the MRC Toxicology Unit and its groups. Affiliated Members are linked to a group and provide the Affiliates with access to the Unit, its expertise and wider opportunities, making them highly valued members of the Unit's research community.

Alex completed PhD studies investigating mechanisms of RNA virus assembly at the University of Leeds in 2014, followed by a Sir Henry Wellcome Fellowship undertaken at Ludwig Maximillian University of Munich, Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry in Munich-Martinsied, and the University of Leeds. In 2019, Alex started his group as a Sir Henry Dale Fellow at the Department of Biochemistry, University of Cambridge.

Rotaviruses are highly contagious pathogens that mainly infect children. Most children will be infected at least once by the age of five, and that means there are a huge number of cases every year – estimated at over 114 million – with upwards of 200,000 deaths. During rotavirus replication, RNA segments are copied many times. It is not clear how rotaviruses 'count' up to 11 so that each new virus acquires a single copy of each segment. Despite the importance of understanding the molecular basis of segmented RNA genome packaging, there is very little knowledge of how eleven distinct RNAs are selected in rotaviruses. Our goal is to find out how rotaviruses select the right gene segments by exploring their individual structures and how they interact with each other. To achieve this, we use a combination of single-molecule fluorescence techniques, RNA imaging and structure probing.