Thanks Margot Riggi and Nayara Santos for this awesome collaboration!

Nayara loves spending time with her family. Her sweet, curious, and brave little girl is the most successful - and time-consuming - experiment of her life! She is supported by her loving husband (and co-author!)

To study how drugs, host restriction factors and other ligands interact with the HIV-1 viral capsid and to better understand the molecular mechanisms of HIV replication, Nayara’s experimental approaches combine biochemical reconstitutions, cryoEM, and molecular virology.

For #SeeingDiversity , meet Dr. Nayara Fernanda Barros Dos Santos Nayara Santos a postdoc in the Pornillos lab U of Utah Dept of Biochemistry! This figure by Margot Riggi illustrates how some HIV-1 CA mutants may produce capsids that are unstable & fall apart in the cytosol, preventing nuclear import.