Lauren M. Oldfield PhD

Lauren Oldfield, Ph.D. is an assistant professor at the J. Craig Venter Institute in the Synthetic Biology and Bioenergy department. Her diverse research interests include viral synthetic genomics for large DNA viruses and investigating the role of the microbiome in injury after pollution exposure.

In her postdoctoral research at the JCVI, she worked with Dr. Sanjay Vashee to develop synthetic genomics tools to improve researchers’ ability to manipulate herpesviruses. Through a strong collaboration with Dr. Prashant Desai, an expert in herpes simplex virus type 1 (HSV-1) biology, at Johns Hopkins University, both groups worked together to successfully implement a novel synthetic genomics method to clone and assemble the HSV-1 genome from smaller overlapping genomic fragments and reconstitute infectious virus in tissue culture. By cloning the HSV-1 genome in fragments, the team can rapidly engineer changes to these fragments in parallel and reassemble full-length genomes with a combination of mutant and wild-type parts.

Dr. Oldfield is now working to expand these synthetic genomics tools to additional viruses and to new scientific and medical problems. For example, this system can be used to study the biology of the inverted repeat regions of HSV-1 and determine if they influence virulence. HSV-1 is also used as an oncolytic virus and gene therapy vector and these tools will enable rapid engineering of HSV-1 based therapeutics. Drs. Vashee and Oldfield also are working to expand this system to other herpesviruses, including Epstein-Barr virus with Dr. Desai and human cytomegalovirus with Dr. Klaus Früh at Oregon Health and Science University, and to viruses that are important agricultural pathogens.