Professor Johnson Mak

Fellow

Bio/Profile
Professor Mak is a native of Hong Kong (as well as a Canadian and an Australian) who undertook his undergraduate and post-graduate training at McGill University, Montreal, Canada. Johnson is a Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology (FAAM) and a Fellow of the Australian Society for Microbiology (FASM). During his PhD, Johnson worked with Professor Lawrence Kleiman at the McGill AIDS Centre studying packaging of primer tRNA into HIV. He subsequently moved to Melbourne, Australia to continue work on HIV assembly at the Burnet Institute. Johnson also held appointments with Monash University, Deakin University and CSIRO AAHL. Johnson is currently a Professor at the Institute for Biomedicine & Glycomics, Griffith University, Gold Coast.

Johnson has a broad research portfolio in HIV having studied primer tRNAs in retroviruses, genomic RNA packaging and dimerization, cholesterol and lipids in HIV, viral-host interactions, imaging of HIV and analysis of recombination and mutation in HIV using next generation sequencing. His team pioneered the production of full-length recombinant HIV Gag for biochemical and biophysical analyses of HIV assembly. Recently Johnson and his team have described a pre-entry priming process for HIV, as well as revealing a novel glycan-glycan biology of HIV that function as molecular Velcro during infection. Other works include the contributions of a cellular process (calcium sparks) to the polarized trafficking of HIV to enable virological synapse formation.

Projects within the Mak lab including dissecting general principle that govern virus attachment and assembly. Viruses systems being examined in the lab include HIV, animal retroviruses (such as koala retrovirus and feline immunodeficiency virus), plus other human viral pathogens, including those in the families of flavivirus and coronavirus.

Works in the Mak lab are currently funded by Mak led fundings from private donors, Australia NHMRC, and US NIH.