Nihal Altan-Bonnet: Tracking viruses that hijack membranes

JCB • VOLUME 210 • NUMBER 7 • 2015 1038 In some ways, Nihal Altan-Bonnet’s career shares similarities with a national security agent, pursuing invaders. As a graduate student in Sandy Simon’s laboratory at The Rockefeller University, she showed that drug-resistant tumor cells were sequestering chemotherapy drugs away in acidified membrane compartments for deportation from the cell (1). That began her studies of phenomena in which the normal functioning of the secretory pathway was usurped for more nefarious purposes. As a postdoc with Jennifer LippincottSchwartz at the NIH in the early 2000s, Altan-Bonnet discovered that the small GTPase Arf1 regulates the Golgi’s function as a docking platform for proteins needed during mitosis (2). As she was moving to Rutgers University in 2006 to set up her own laboratory, a golden collaboration landed in her lap. That led her group to uncover Arf1’s role in the hijacking of the secretory pathway by positive-stranded RNA viruses, including those that cause polio, the common cold, and hepatitis C (3, 4). In 2013, she returned to the NIH in Bethesda, Maryland, where her group revealed a new mode of viral transmission: hundreds of stowaway virus particles are packed into phosphatidylserine-rich vesicles, expunged and picked up en masse by the next cell (5). Altan-Bonnet spoke with JCB about the sneaky moves viruses make and her solution to the two-body problem.