Our research aims to use these evolutionary principles, combined with virology and mechanistic biochemistry, to understand how our immune system has evolved to defend against pathogens and how pathogens counter-evolve to defeat host immunity. One of the approaches we take is to use comparative genomics to identify characteristic signatures of pathogen-driven innovation (e.g. rapid sequence evolution, horizontal gene transfer, gene birth and death, and gene recombination). Interestingly, we expect these rapidly evolving genes to be at the center of host-pathogen conflicts, yet many of them are almost entirely uncharacterized. This provides an opportunity to use pathogens to discover novel biological functions that are involved in not only pathogen immunity but also more global cellular regulation. Current projects in the lab focus on functional characterization of two such poorly understood systems: post-transcriptional modification of RNA to molecularly distinguish between different RNAs (e.g. host RNA versus viral RNA), and post-translational modifications of proteins to regulate their function. The ultimate goal of our research is to understand the rapidly evolving molecular means by which hosts and pathogens battle each other, while at the same time providing insight into how genetic variation resulting from these conflicts contributes to differences in human susceptibility to infectious diseases.