Peter Sarnow, Ph.D. Peter Sarnow is a Professor in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at Stanford University School of Medicine. He received his Ph.D. in 1982 from the State University of New York at Stony Brook, working on the functions of the adenovirus tumor antigens in the laboratory of Dr. Arnold J. Levine. He subsequently joined the laboratory of Dr. David Baltimore at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Cambridge, MA. There he studied virus-host interactions in poliovirus-infected cells using an infectious viral cDNA as a tool. In 1986, he took an independent faculty position in the Department of Biochemistry, Biophysics and Genetics at the University of Colorado where he discovered internal ribosome entry sites (IRES) in cellular mRNAs and established a program to examine mRNA-ribosome interactions in mammalian cells. After his move to Stanford University in 1996, he discovered and studied diverse IRES elements in insect viruses that can bind ribosomes and mediate translation without the aid of canonical translation initiation factors from the A-site of the ribosome. In collaboration with Joachim Frank and Christian Spahn at the Wadsworth Center in Albany, New York, a cryo-electron microscopic view of an IRES bound to 80S ribosomes could be obtained. These studies indicated that IRES elements can function as RNA-based translation factors. More recently, his laboratory has been studying the mechanism by which certain microRNA molecules regulate expression of cellular and viral mRNAs. In particular, he is focusing on the mechanism by which a liver-specific microRNA upregulates the abundance of hepatitis C viral RNAs in infected cultured liver cells. These research venues point to a novel viral Achilles’ heel and potential antiviral therapeutics.

Dr. Sarnow is an editor of Virology and is on the editorial board of Genes & Development, Journal of Virology and Molecular & Cellular Biology. His pre- and postdoctoral studies were supported by stipends from the Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, respectively. His independent faculty research was supported by a Faculty Research Award of the American Cancer Society.