Pressure-driven release of viral genome into a host nucleus is a mechanism leading to herpes infection
- University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, United States
- Carnegie Mellon University, United States
- The University of Chicago, United States
Abstract
Many viruses previously have been shown to have pressurized genomes inside their viral protein shell, termed the capsid. This pressure results from the tight confinement of negatively charged viral nucleic acids inside the capsid. However, the relevance of capsid pressure to viral infection has not been demonstrated. In this work, we show that the internal DNA pressure of tens of atmospheres inside a herpesvirus capsid powers ejection of the viral genome into a host cell nucleus. To our knowledge, this provides the first demonstration of a pressure-dependent mechanism of viral genome penetration into a host nucleus, leading to infection of eukaryotic cells.
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Funding
National Science Foundation (CHE-1507694)
- Alex Evilevitch
Vetenskapsrådet (621-2014-5537)
- Alex Evilevitch
Vetenskapsrådet (349- 2014-3962)
- Alex Evilevitch
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Copyright
© 2019, Brandariz-Nuñez 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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Pressure-driven release of viral genome into a host nucleus is a mechanism leading to herpes infection
eLife 8:e47212.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.47212
