Description:

Title

"Herpesviruses Use a Developmental Cue to Establish Infection"

Jenai  Quan, Graduate Student, DGP

Lab of Gregory A. Smith, PhD

Faculty Host: Gregory A Smith, PhD

Topic:

Neurotropic alphaherpesviruses proficiently invade the mammalian nervous system using an atypical intracellular trafficking process. To identify virus-host interactions that contribute to neuroinvasion, we used a proximity-based ligation method. This revealed the Wnt signaling protein, Dishevelled 2 (DVL2), as a potential factor governing infection. Two viral enzymes, pUL36 and pUS3, triggered DVL2 post-translational modification early in infection. Unexpectedly, ablating the catalytic sites of these two non-essential enzymes resulted in synthetic lethality. However, the addition of exogenous Wnt to cells rescued propagation of the double-mutant virus. These results indicate that herpesviruses trigger a developmental signaling protein to make cells permissive to infection. My ongoing research is focused on a mechanistic understanding of this early stage of infection.