Parker

John S. Parker, assistant professor of virology at Cornell's College of Veterinary Medicine, received the 2007 Pfizer Animal Health Award for Research Excellence for his work on the biology and pathology of reoviruses. Reoviruses cause mild infections of the upper respiratory and gastrointestinal tract of humans and may be effective against certain forms of cancer.

The award has been provided to schools of veterinary medicine since 1985, promoting the accomplishments and research productivity of faculty members in the early stages of their careers.

Parker studies how double-stranded RNA reoviruses replicate and assemble within the watery, gel-like fluid, or cytoplasm, of infected cells. Cells infected with reoviruses have large "viral factories" within their cytoplasm, which are the sites of new viral particle assembly and transcription of the viral genome. Parker has, for example, identified two viral proteins that are sufficient to form the matrix or infrastructure of the factories. His laboratory is now attempting to unravel how these structures function during viral replication and assembly and what effects they have on cellular physiology. In addition, he investigates how the virus induces death in infected cells, which relates to viral pathogenesis and potential applications in cancer therapy, and he works on feline calicivirus, an important infectious disease of cats that is a model for calicivirus infections in other species, including humans.