USP49 potently stabilizes APOBEC3G protein by removing ubiquitin and inhibits HIV-1 replication
Abstract
The antiviral activity of host factor apolipoprotein B mRNA editing enzyme catalytic polypeptide-like 3G (APOBEC3G, A3G) and its degradation mediated by human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) Vif protein are important topics. Although accumulating evidence indicates the importance of deubiquitination enzymes (DUBs) in innate immunity, it is unknown if they participate in A3G stability. Here, we found that USP49 directly interacts with A3G and efficiently removes ubiquitin, consequently increasing A3G protein expression and significantly enhancing its anti-HIV-1 activity. Unexpectedly, A3G degradation was also mediated by a Vif- and cullin-ring-independent pathway, which was effectively counteracted by USP49. Furthermore, clinical data suggested that USP49 is correlated with A3G protein expression and hypermutations in Vif-positive proviruses, and inversely with the intact provirus ratio in the HIV-1 latent reservoir. Our studies demonstrated a mechanism to effectively stabilize A3G expression, which could comprise a target to control HIV-1 infection and eradicate the latent reservoir.
Data availability
All data generated or analysed during this study are included in the manuscript and supporting files.
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
National Special Research Program of China for Important Infectious Diseases (2018ZX10302103; 2017ZX10202102)
- Hui Zhang
The Important Key Program of the Natural Science Foundation of China (81730060)
- Hui Zhang
The International Collaboration Program of the Natural Science Foundation of China and the U.S. NIH (81561128007)
- Hui Zhang
The Joint-Innovation Program in Healthcare for Special Scientific Research Projects of Guangzhou (201803040002)
- Hui Zhang
The Science and Technology Planning Project of Guangzhou (201704020226)
- Ting Pan
Pearl River S and T Nova Program of Guangzhou (201806010118)
- Ting Pan
National Natural Science Foundation of China (8197080527)
- Ting Pan
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Ethics
Human subjects: All human samples were anonymously coded in accordance with the local ethical guidelines (as stipulated by the Declaration of Helsinki). The Ethics Review Board of Sun Yat-Sen University and the Ethics Review Board of Guangzhou 8th People's Hospital approved this study.Written informed consents were provided by all study participants, and the protocol was approved by the IRB of Guangzhou Eighth People's Hospital (Guangzhou, China).
Copyright
© 2019, Pan 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.
Metrics
-
- 1,774
- views
-
- 342
- downloads
-
- 24
- citations
Views, downloads and citations are aggregated across all versions of this paper published by eLife.
Download links
Downloads (link to download the article as PDF)
Open citations (links to open the citations from this article in various online reference manager services)
Cite this article (links to download the citations from this article in formats compatible with various reference manager tools)
Further reading
-
- Ecology
- Microbiology and Infectious Disease
Predicting how species diversity changes along environmental gradients is an enduring problem in ecology. In microbes, current theories tend to invoke energy availability and enzyme kinetics as the main drivers of temperature-richness relationships. Here, we derive a general empirically-grounded theory that can explain this phenomenon by linking microbial species richness in competitive communities to variation in the temperature-dependence of their interaction and growth rates. Specifically, the shape of the microbial community temperature-richness relationship depends on how rapidly the strength of effective competition between species pairs changes with temperature relative to the variance of their growth rates. Furthermore, it predicts that a thermal specialist-generalist tradeoff in growth rates alters coexistence by shifting this balance, causing richness to peak at relatively higher temperatures. Finally, we show that the observed patterns of variation in thermal performance curves of metabolic traits across extant bacterial taxa is indeed sufficient to generate the variety of community-level temperature-richness responses observed in the real world. Our results provide a new and general mechanism that can help explain temperature-diversity gradients in microbial communities, and provide a quantitative framework for interlinking variation in the thermal physiology of microbial species to their community-level diversity.
-
- Cell Biology
- Microbiology and Infectious Disease
Zika virus (ZIKV) infection causes significant human disease that, with no approved treatment or vaccine, constitutes a major public health concern. Its life cycle entirely relies on the cytoplasmic fate of the viral RNA genome (vRNA) through a fine-tuned equilibrium between vRNA translation, replication, and packaging into new virions, all within virus-induced replication organelles (vROs). In this study, with an RNA interference (RNAi) mini-screening and subsequent functional characterization, we have identified insulin-like growth factor 2 mRNA-binding protein 2 (IGF2BP2) as a new host dependency factor that regulates vRNA synthesis. In infected cells, IGF2BP2 associates with viral NS5 polymerase and redistributes to the perinuclear viral replication compartment. Combined fluorescence in situ hybridization-based confocal imaging, in vitro binding assays, and immunoprecipitation coupled to RT-qPCR showed that IGF2BP2 directly interacts with ZIKV vRNA 3’ nontranslated region. Using ZIKV sub-genomic replicons and a replication-independent vRO induction system, we demonstrated that IGF2BP2 knockdown impairs de novo vRO biogenesis and, consistently, vRNA synthesis. Finally, the analysis of immunopurified IGF2BP2 complex using quantitative mass spectrometry and RT-qPCR revealed that ZIKV infection alters the protein and RNA interactomes of IGF2BP2. Altogether, our data support that ZIKV hijacks and remodels the IGF2BP2 ribonucleoprotein complex to regulate vRO biogenesis and vRNA neosynthesis.