Abstract

Many retroviral Gag proteins contain PPXY late assembly domain motifs that recruit proteins of the NEDD4 ubiquitin E3 ligase family to facilitate virus release. Overexpression of NEDD4L can also stimulate HIV-1 release but in this case the Gag protein lacks a PPXY motif, suggesting that NEDD4L may function through an adaptor protein. Here, we demonstrate that the cellular protein Angiomotin (AMOT) can bind both NEDD4L and HIV-1 Gag. HIV-1 release and infectivity are stimulated by AMOT overexpression and inhibited by AMOT,depletion, whereas AMOT mutants that cannot bind NEDD4L cannot function in virus release. Electron microscopic analyses revealed that in the absence of AMOT assembling Gag molecules fail to form a fully spherical enveloped particle. Our experiments indicate that AMOT and other motin family members function together with NEDD4L to help complete immature virion assembly prior to ESCRT-mediated virus budding.

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Author details

  1. Gaelle Mercenne

    Department of Biochemistry, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, United States
    Competing interests
    The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
  2. Steven L Alam

    Department of Biochemistry, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, United States
    Competing interests
    The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
  3. Jun Arii

    Department of Biochemistry, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, United States
    Competing interests
    The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
  4. Matthew S Lalonde

    Department of Biochemistry, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, United States
    Competing interests
    The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
  5. Wesley I Sundquist

    Department of Biochemistry, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, United States
    For correspondence
    wes@biochem.utah.edu
    Competing interests
    The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

Copyright

© 2015, Mercenne et al.

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.

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  1. Gaelle Mercenne
  2. Steven L Alam
  3. Jun Arii
  4. Matthew S Lalonde
  5. Wesley I Sundquist
(2015)
Angiomotin functions in HIV-1 assembly and budding
eLife 4:e03778.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.03778

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https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.03778

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