Louisa Iselin, a PhD Student at the University of Oxford, speaks about her fundamental research on viral RNA structures and how they interact with host RNA binding proteins.

RNA is not just a "squiggly line", like textbook diagrams could lead us to believe, but adopts higher order secondary structures that influence key steps in viral pathogenesis, including sensing by the innate immune system. 

This episode explores the association of distinctive RNA structures with persistence of viruses in their hosts, what CpG dinucleotide patterns are and how they could affect viral fitness, and how proteomics and computational approaches are used to make sense of protein-RNA interactions.