Spiking the Particle – Technology & Applications | Weizmann Wonder Wander

Prof. Yosef Shaul was a postdoc at the University of California, San Francisco in the 1980s when he read about the recently discovered genome of the hepatitis B virus (HBV). Already widely associated with liver cancer, the virus turned out to be a tiny DNA virus which uses RNA to replicate.

“At the level of basic science it was very important. We had never seen this kind of virus before with its unique type of genome and life-cycle,” says Prof. Shaul, now in the Department of Molecular Genetics at the Weizmann Institute. His lifelong quest to understand the mechanisms of the virus, and…