Mélissa is an Assistant Professor of Microbiology at Harvard Medical School (HMS) Blavatnik Institute and an Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at Boston Children’s Hospital. She has spent the past two decades studying molecular mechanisms of translational control. Her laboratory’s goal is to elucidate critical differences in how translation is carried out in parasites versus human cells. Their long-term goal is to ultimately harness this information to help develop safe and effective antiparasitic drugs. During her graduate studies, she examined the programmed -1 frameshift that occurs during the full-length HIV-1 viral messenger RNA (mRNA) translation. Since her postdoctoral studies and as she launched her independent research laboratory, she has focused on the factors involved in translation initiation – specifically, the cap-binding proteins that engage the 5’ terminal end of mRNAs and that facilitate the ribosomal recruitment to initiate protein synthesis. For example, she used X-ray crystallography and nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) to determine how 4EGI-1, a translation initiation inhibitor with anti-cancer activity, interacts with the cap-binding protein eIF4E and modulates its repression by an eIF4E-binding protein (4E-BP1) (Sekiyama, N., et al. (2015). PNAS). Parasites often need to rapidly change the levels of their proteins to facilitate their ability to adapt to different environments. In close collaboration with the laboratory of Dr. Michal Shapira at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel, her lab has helped extensively to characterize many of the factors involved in mRNA recognition in the human parasite Leishmania major. They showed that a Leishmania IF4E interacting protein (Leish4E-IP1) modulates the cap-binding activity of the Leishmania IF4E isoform 1 (LeishIF4E-1) by altering the conformation of critical tryptophans located within its cap-binding pocket (Meleppattu, S. et al. (2018). NAR). They also recently showed that a novel interacting protein, Leish4E-IP2, is a general inhibitor of cap-binding protein paralogs in Leishmania (Tupperwar, N., et al. (2020). NAR). Her laboratory is now capitalizing on their expertise in molecular biology and cellular biophysics/protein structure determination (X-ray crystallography, NMR spectroscopy, and single-particle cryo-EM) to study mechanisms of specialized translation initiation in parasites, including, but not limited to Leishmania and Plasmodium species organisms.