Genes Involved in the Late Stage of Lytic Development of Epstein-Barr Virus (I)

  • Liu, Shih-Tung (PI)

Project: National Science and Technology CouncilNational Science and Technology Council Academic Grants

Project Details

Abstract

Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) is a human herpesvirus that is often implicated in lymphoid and epithelial malignancies. Although EBV contains genes that are critical to enabling the virus to retain its latency following infection, most of the EBV genes are associated with lytic development. Furthermore, EBV has a large genome, so studying EBV genes can be difficult, explaining why the functions of many EBV genes remain unknown. This laboratory use a bacterial transposon, EZ::Tn<KAN-2>, and generated about 50000 EBV mutants. The mutant DNA can be manipulated in Escherichia coli and then transfected into cells for genetic and functional analyses. This investigation will use these mutants to identify the genes that are involved in EBV maturation. The proposed work will screen the mutants for those that cannot complete the maturation process; characterize the functions of the genes that are necessary for maturation, and confirm them by genetic complementation and electron microscopy. Furthermore, this proposed study will focus on one of the EBV maturation events – nuclear egress. For EBV, BFLF2 has a sequence homology to one of the genes involved in nuclear egress of herpes simplex virus type 1 (HSV-1). Since proteins participate in HSV-1 nuclear egress often interact, the BFLF2 may be used as bait to identify the proteins that are crucial to EBV nuclear egress by yeast two-hybrid screening. The interaction can be verified by GSTpull down and coimmunoprecipitation. This investigation will ultimately identify the genes that are required for EBV maturation; a process that is critical to EBV lytic development and understanding how the virus proliferates in human cells.

Project IDs

Project ID:PA9405-0117
External Project ID:NSC94-3112-B182-004
StatusFinished
Effective start/end date01/05/0530/04/06

Keywords

  • Epstein-Barr virus
  • mutants
  • maturation
  • nuclear egress
  • lytic cycle

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