Biography                                          

Gloria Arriagada obtained her Doctorate in Cellular and Molecular Biology from Universidad de Concepcion in 2007, she performed her thesis under the supervision of Dr. Martin Montecino, were she studied the association of Vitamin D3 receptor to the nuclear matrix. Then, with the help of a Pew Fellowship she joined the laboratory of Dr. Stephen P Goff at Columbia University in October 2007. There she studied the role of SUMOylation and SUMO-interacting motifs during MLV and HIV restriction by TRIM5alpha, discovered a retrotrasposon in clams that is highly associated with leukemia in those animals and perform a screening to search for host factors associated to MLV preintegration complex. In 2012 she returned to Chile, were she joined the Departamento de Ciencias Biológicas, from the Facultad de Ciencias Biologicas at Universidad Andres Bello in the city of Viña del Mar. Since December 2018 she is a member of the Instituto de Ciencias Biomédicas  de la Facultad de Medicina de la Universidad Andres Bello in Santiago. Dr. Arriagada has graduated 8 Master Students, 5 undergraduates and is currently supervising 1 doctoral thesis. She has been awarded 2 FONDECYT Regular grants, 1 UNAB internal grant and 1 Nucleo-UNAB, and was part of Nucleo Milenio Biology of Neuropsychiatric disorders-NuMIND.

Research Description

The focus of my research is to understand the relationship between viruses and their hosts. I have to main research lines: 1) to understand how retroviruses utilize the cellular machinery, focusing in early events of viral infection, such as entry and retrograde traffic, and 2) to understand the role of endogenous viral elements (EVEs) in cellular physiology and pathology using as model parvoviral derived EVEs and retrotransposons.

Key Publications

Arriagada G. Retroviruses and microtubule-associated motor proteins. Cell Microbiol. 2017 Sep;19(9). doi: 10.1111/cmi.12759. Epub 2017 Jul 12. Review.

Opazo T, Garcés A, Tapia D, Barraza F, Bravo A, Schwenke T, Cancino J, Arriagada G. Functional Evidence of the Involvement of the Dynein Light Chain DYNLRB2 in Murine Leukemia Virus Infection. J Virol. 2017 Apr 28;91(10). pii: e00129-17. doi: 10.1128/JVI.00129-17. Print 2017 May 15  Valle-Tenney R, Opazo T, Cancino J, Goff SP, Arriagada G. Dynein Regulators Are Important for Ecotropic Murine Leukemia Virus Infection. J Virol. 2016 Jul 11;90(15):6896-905. doi: 10.1128/JVI.00863-16. Arriagada G, Metzger MJ, Muttray AF, Sherry J, Reinisch C, Street C, Lipkin WI, Goff SP. Activation of transcription and retrotransposition of a novel retroelement, Steamer, in neoplastic hemocytes of the mollusk Mya arenaria. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A.2014 Sep 30;111(39):14175-80. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1409945111. Arriagada G^#, Gifford RJ^#. Parvovirus-derived endogenous viral elements in two South American rodent genomes. J Virol. 2014 Oct;88(20):12158-62. doi: 10.1128/JVI.01173-14. For a full list of publications please follow this link