News and Activities

Congratulations to Revan and Wang! The work led by our collaborators at Duke, with Revan and Wang as 2nd and 3rd authors, has been accepted for publication in Nature Communications (2025) and is currently in press. A fantastic achievement and we are proud to be part of this collaboration. Many thanks to Wang and Revan for the coffee.
Exciting news! 🎉 A huge congratulations to Kumar on receiving an offer for admission to the inaugural class of the IBMS PhD program at UTT SOM for Fall 2025!

A heartfelt thank you to Kumar for trusting us and staying with us as he embarks on this exciting, challenging, and remarkable PhD journey. We are honored to be part of it and look forward to the years ahead!

In March 2025, Maolin delivered two invited talks as a special invited speaker, first at the UCLA-UCI CFAR Symposium 2025 in Palm Springs, CA, and then at the Duke SAB meeting in Durham, NC.
Congratulations to Revan, Wang, Yang, and Xinyu on their research article, "Inter-protomer opening cooperativity of envelope trimers positively correlates with HIV-1 entry stoichiometry," published in mBio, 2025, ahead of print, Read the full article here: Link to the article.
Congratulations to Revan and Yang on their contributions to the collaborative study with NIH/NIAID and Columbia University, "HIV-1 Envelope Trimer Transitions from Prefusion-Closed to CD4-Bound Open Conformations Through an Occluded Intermediate State," published in the Computational and Structural Biotechnology Journal! Read the full article here: Link to the article.
Congratulations to Wang and Yang on their publication, "Multi-step Shapeshifting of SARS-CoV-2 Omicron Spikes During Fusion," in Structure!
Check out the special research collection at Frontiers in Immunology entitled "Viral Surface Spikes: Host Cell Entry, Immune Responses and Evasion, and Implications for Viral Infection, Inhibition and Rebound."Now, it is open for submission.
This research topic, developed in alignment with the objectives of the Duke Center for HIV Structural Biology (DCHSB), has been expanded to include a diverse range of viral pathogens and host systems. We invite submissions of Original Research, Reviews, and Mini-Reviews on the following topics:
i) Molecular mechanism of viral spike-mediated host cell entry and immune evasion, ii) Innate and adaptive immune responses to viral surface spike glycoproteins, iii) Structure-based vaccine design and antibody therapies targeting viral spike proteins, iv) Antigenic profiling of spike proteins and strategies to block viral infection and rebound, v)Mechanisms of action for anti-spike antibodies, peptide inhibitors, and small molecules, and vi) Spike protein-mediated virus-to-cell fusion and cell-to-cell transmission.
Congratulations to Wang Xu on receiving the Duke Center for HIV Structural Biology (DCHSB) Trainee Travel Award for presenting our laboratory's research work at the 28th West Coast Retrovirus Meeting (WCRM), held from October 3-5, 2024! Wishing him great success in his oral presentation at the meeting!
Congratulations to our lab on receiving an R01 for $2.2 million from the National Institutes of Health - View Press Release
Congratulations to Dr. Lu on receiving an R35 MIRA grant for $1.8 million from the National Institutes of Health. She is the first at UT Tyler to receive this award. - View Press Release
In the news: $1.8 million grant awearded to UT Tyler School of Medicine junior researcher
In the news: UT Tyler School of Medicine junior researcher awarded $1.8 million grant - Tyler Morning Telegraph
Congratulations to Dr. Lu on being one of two 2022 - 2023 DCHSB CDA recipients.
Congratulations to Dr. Lu on being one of the award recipients of Gilead Research Scholars in HIV
On June 1st, 2021, Dr. Lu embarked on a new chapter of her career path as an independent PI at UTHSCT and received the amfAR Mathilde Krim Award - Phase II on June 2nd, 2021!