Lynnette Goatley

Lynnette joined the African swine fever vaccinology group 6 years ago after working in the African swine fever group for 22 years. Lynnette has taken two approaches to producing a vaccine for ASFV, either by producing genetically modified live attenuated vaccines with

specific deletions of genes thought to shut off the host immune responses or designing a subunit vaccine which contained genes with T cell epitopes which Lynnette identified as immunogenic.

Lynnette has set up a pipeline to carry out ASFV whole genome sequencing on archived historical samples as well as samples from present day outbreaks. This included using two sequencing platforms; Nanopore sequencing gives long reads and is used to build a backbone of the genome and Illumina sequencing gives much shorter reads but gives the accuracy needed.

Lynnette has been working closely with Tom Burdon’s group at the Roslin Institute and has been using induce pluripotent stem cell derived macrophages (iPSCdMs) to study ASF virus replication in cells and host responses to the virus. Lynnette has also been utilising stem-cell derived macrophages from African suids to try and identify differences that could explain differential resistant to disease. Lynnette is currently setting up the technology at Pirbright to propagate the iPSCs and differentiate them into macrophages. Lynnette will also optimise gene editing of iPSCs using CRISPR/Cas9 iPSCs to produce gene knock out macrophages.

Prior to working on ASFV Lynnette worked in the Morbilli virus group at the Institute and was involved in the global eradication of Rinderpest and the identification and sequencing of two new viruses (dolphin and porpoise morbilliviruses).