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Crick Group Leader and Senior Research Fellow

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Rachel Edgar is a Crick Group Leader of the Host Homeostasis and Infectious Diseases lab, and Senior Research Fellow at Imperial College London.

Rachel's lab investigates how cells and viruses interact, to better understand infection susceptibility, virus replication and transmission. They focus on host osmotic and protein homeostasis, biomolecular condensates, circadian rhythms, inflammation and antiviral immunity.

Rachel studied Natural Sciences and completed her PhD in herpesvirus biology at the University of Cambridge in 2012. She then gained experience in circadian biology and neuroscience working as a post-doctoral research associate at the University of Cambridge Institute of Metabolic Science, and then as an Investigator Scientist at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology. She joined Imperial College in December 2017 and hold a Royal Society - Wellcome Sir Henry Dale Fellowship.

The homeostatic state of the cell when it encounters pathogens ultimately determines the success or failure of the infection. This baseline state changes depending on the time of day, the extracellular environment, prior cellular activity and stress state. The Edgar lab is interested in how these factors interact to impact the infection susceptibility, virus replication and production of new virus particles for transmission to others. For example, individual cells have molecular circadian clocks that coordinate 24h rhythms in activities such as gene transcription, protein synthesis, metabolism, energy production and immune signalling. These processes are co-opted by viruses in order to replicate, and the lab has found that the amount of replication in cells and disease in animal models depends on the time that they are infected.

The lab is currently exploring how mechanisms of cellular osmotic and protein homeostasis impact inflammatory and antiviral immunity, virus replication and stress responses using physiologically relevant primary cell models and natural host-pathogen pairs to test hypotheses. In addition, they apply their fundamental research to find novel ways to prevent virus transmission, focusing on respiratory infections such as SARS-CoV-2 and influenza. 

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