Posts Tagged ‘replication’

The double life of a geminivirus: Bean yellow dwarf virus

29 May, 2015

Every now and then I solicit contributions for this site – but this one came without coercion, or even prompting!  I thank Romana for being so enthusiastic B-)

Romana Yanez

Biopharming Research Unit, UCT

All material copyright Romana Yanez and UCT

***

I want to tell the story of a geminivirus called Bean yellow dwarf virus that has two very distinct “lives”: one as a crop pest, infecting bean plants in South Africa and the other as a powerful molecular tool as a viral vector for recombinant protein expression in plants. As if each one of the “heads” of the twinned capsids had a life of its own. The dark side and the bright side. The yin and yang…

Introduction

Geminiviruses are small, single-stranded, circular DNA plant viruses, so called because each particle is composed of two partially assembled icosahedra joined to form a twinned capsid [1], [2]. They infect plants and are carried by insect vectors such as leafhoppers and whiteflies [2]. They are divided into seven genera: Mastrevirus, Bogomovirus, Topocuvirus, Curtovirus, Becurtovirus, Eragrovirus and Turncurtovirus; according to their genomic organization, the hosts they infect, the insect vectors by which they are transmitted and by genome-wide pairwise sequence identities [3].

Geminiviruses belonging to the genus Mastrevirus are all monopartite viruses with genome sizes between 2.5 and 3.0 kb. They have as vectors different species of leafhoppers. They infect mostly monocotyledonous plants: Maize streak virus (MSV) causes devastating crop losses in African countries, Wheat dwarf virus (WDV), but also infect dicotyledonous plants: Bean yellow dwarf virus (BeYDV), Tobacco yellow dwarf virus (TYDV) and Chickpea chlorosis virus (CpCV) [2], [4], [5].

In 1997 the production of French beans (Phaseolus vulgaris cv. Bonus) was severely reduced  in South Africa, mainly in the Northern Province and Mpumalanga District [4]. Plants presented symptoms similar to a TYDV infection, which at the time was the only mastrevirus described to infect dicotyledonous plants. These symptoms included stunted growth, brittle and leathery leaves, and leaf curling. Investigating the aetiology of this disease were Liu and co-workers. They determined it was a geminiviral infection by identifying virus-like particles (VLPs) with the characteristic twinned morphology. They then sequenced DNA samples of the virus and found it to be most closely related to TYDV, both, in nucleotide sequence (65% identity) and in genomic organization. It was similar enough to be placed under the genus Mastrevirus but distinct enough to be considered a different virus. They Then called it Bean yellow dwarf virus – BeYDV [4].

In 2007 a mild strain of BeYDV (BeYDV-m) was described by Halley-Stott et al. also isolated from P. vulgaris (cv. Top Crop). It was phylogenetically similar to BeYDV having 97% nucleotide sequence identity, but presented sufficient phenotypic differences to be a different BeYDV strain. It contained 81 nucleotide differences compared to the BeYDV type, most of which (63 changes) were found in regions of the genome that directly influenced its replication. Thus, BeYDV-m produced typical symptoms that were less severe and temporally delayed when compared to BeYDV type. The authors also suggested that P. vulgaris is not the BeYDV natural host since it is a non-indigenous plant in South Africa. Furthermore, since both strains of BeYDV were isolated in the same region, it was also suggested that their natural host may show very mild or no symptoms upon infection [6]. Subsequently BeYDV-m was renamed as Chickpea chlorotic dwarf virus (CpCDV) [3]. [However, we like BeYDV, so we’re going to keep called it that – Ed]

Molecular Characteristics and Life Cycle of BeYDV

The genome of BeYDV (Figure 1) is 2,561 nucleotides long with an organization similar to that of other mastreviruses and that replicates by rolling circle mechanism [4], [7]. Its genome is bidirectional, consisting of virion-sense open reading frames (ORFs) V1 and V2, and complementary-sense ORFs C1, C2, C3 and C4. Of these, only C3 and C4 are non-functional and non-conserved between the mastreviruses; although they are also present in TYDV [4], [8]. Within the complementary sense ORFs C1 and C2 an intron is found which is also conserved in other mastreviruses. Virion sense and complementary sense ORFs are separated by a long intergenic region (LIR) and a small intergenic region (SIR) [4]. Liu and co-workers described the functions of each component of the BeYDV genome by mutational analysis.

Figure 1. Genomic organization of Bean yellow dwarf virus. CP, capsid protein. LIR, long intergenic region. MP, movement protein. Rep, replication associated protein. SIR, short intergenic region. [9]

Figure 1. Genomic organization of Bean yellow dwarf virus. CP, capsid protein. LIR, long intergenic region. MP, movement protein. Rep, replication associated protein. SIR, short intergenic region. [9]

The LIR contains a bidirectional promoter to which host factors can bind and a stem-loop structure within the origin of replication (ori) which is required for initiation of rolling circle replication. A binding site and nicking site for the replication associated protein (Rep) are also found in this region. The SIR in turn contains a primer binding region for initiation of complementary strand synthesis as well as transcription termination elements [8]. These are the only two cis-acting elements required for BeYDV replication [8], [10].

The V1 ORF encodes for the movement protein (MP) which is associated with plasmodesmata and is important for systemic spread of the virus. It was found to be a symptom inducer as transgenic plants expressing V1 developed wild type-like infection symptoms. The putative pathogen associated molecular pattern recognized by the host plant may be within the first 17 N-terminus amino acids as plants infected with a mutant  developed wild type-like symptoms as well [8]. 

The V2 ORF encodes for the capsid protein (CP) which is important for viral movement as well and therefore for systemic infection. Thus, intracellular movement or trafficking of the viral DNA may require encapsidation. This was suggested since V2 mutants did not infect plants systemically and also, a basic domain on the N-terminal of the CP was identified which putatively binds to DNA or is involved in nuclear localization [8], [11].

From the genome of BeYDV, the complementary sense ORFs C1 and C2 are the most interesting for me. These encode two regulatory proteins involved in the replication of the virus: Rep and RepA. Their expression is regulated by alternate splicing, where spliced C1 and C2 (C1C2) mRNA is translated into Rep and unspliced C1 mRNA is translated into RepA [8]. 

Rep is responsible for initiating rolling circle replication by nicking the stem-loop structure at the ori, and for releasing nascent virion sense single stranded DNA and later ligating it to form circular ssDNA molecules [8], [12]. Rep is the only protein required for BeYDV replication, but in the presence of RepA the replication is more efficient [8], [10], [11].

RepA is a multi-regulatory protein only found in mastreviruses [2]. Even though both Rep and RepA, have a retinoblastoma related protein (RBR)-binding motif, LeuXCysXGlu, in BeYDV only RepA is able to bind to RBR proteins [10]. In mammalian cells, the retinoblastoma protein is a tumor repressor that binds to and inactivates the transcription factor E2F. By binding to RBR proteins, RepA is thought to disrupt this interaction and force the plant cell cycle into the S-phase – where DNA is replicated just before cell division. RepA is thus acting like other viruses’ oncogenic proteins, such as the human papillomavirus E7 protein and the adenovirus E1A protein. Thus, keeping conditions favorable for enhanced viral replication and proliferation [10], [11]. This could be seen when Hefferon and Dugdale mutated the RBR binding-motif of Rep and RepA to LeuXCysXGln. Only the RepA mutant showed significantly decreased replication. While the Rep mutant showed wild type-like replication [11].

Having in mind what I just described, one can picture the life cycle of BeYDV as follows:

A leafhopper (which has not been identified yet) carrying the virus infects a host plant – this will be a dicotyledonous plant such as P. vulgaris, from which it was originally isolated. The virus releases its ssDNA genome into the cytoplasm. The ssDNA enters the nucleus where host’s replication machinery synthesizes the complementary strand from the primer located in the SIR region, generating a replicative double stranded circular DNA intermediate. At this point the dsDNA serves as template for gene expression, from which Rep and RepA are expressed. RepA transactivates virion-sense gene expression and interferes with plant cell’s life cycle to produce S-phase conditions. Rep nicks the stem-loop structure located at the ori and binds to the 5’ end of the nicked strand. The 3’ end acts as a primer for the synthesis of a new virion-sense strand displacing the previous virion-sense strand. When this new strand is complete, the ori is regenerated and Rep nicks it again. Subsequent release and recircularization of the nascent virion-sense strand is also mediated by Rep. The process continues on the new circular ssDNA molecules as well. Only later, when the amount of CP is high enough, ssDNA molecules are encapsidated. The CP and MP then mediate systemic spread of the viral genome [2], [8]–[12]. When another leafhopper visits the infected plant, the virus is transferred to other plants and all starts again (Figure 2).

gv fig 2

Figure 2. The life cycle of BeYDV. Black circle, BeYDV ssDNA with the stem-loop structure. Black and green circle, BeYDV dsDNA replicative intermediate. Orange spheres, plant host’s replication machinery. Yellow spheres, Rep protein. Black line, nascent ssDNA during rolling circle replication. Purple sphere, RepA. Green sphere, plant retinoblastoma-related protein. Red spheres, BeYDV movement protein. Geminal structures, BeYDV capsid proteins. Modified from [13], [14].

Liu et al. (1997) and Halley-Stott et al. (2007) showed that BeYDV is able to infect other dicotyledonous plants besides P. vulgaris, such as: Nicotiana tabacum, N. benthamiana, Datura stramonium and Arabidopsis thaliana [4], [6]. It has also been isolated from chickpeas in Pakistan [15]. It was noted by Liu and co-workers that the intron of BeYDV (and TYDV) is not as AU-rich as intron sequences present in dicotyledonous plants, which suggested that these viruses had evolved from monocotyledonous-infecting ancestors [8]. Other thing that suggests that BeYDV (and TYDV) evolved from monocotyledonous-infecting mastreviruses is that they encode for two variants of the Rep protein while other geminiviruses infecting dicotyledonous plants encode for only one Rep protein from a continuous ORF [11].

BeYDV as a Powerful Molecular Tool

I have talked about the relatively dark side of BeYDV as a crop pest and plant cell cycle manipulator. Now I would like to introduce you to the other face of this geminivirus.

The importance of recombinant proteins in pharmaceutical, medical and research fields makes them highly demanded, which in turn requires the use efficient production systems [16], [17]. Plants provide a cheaper, faster, more efficient and highly scalable platform for the production of proteins compared to other methods [18], [19]. Vectors based on DNA viruses can be used to express complex proteins without the limitations and complexity faced by RNA viruses such as the need to use more than one virus construct, size constraint imposed on the insert and genomic instability [2], [20]. BeYDV and other geminiviruses have small and simple DNA genomes which can be rapidly amplified to very high copy numbers using mainly host factors and that can be easily manipulated. These features make them attractive viruses for the design of plant vectors for the expression of recombinant proteins [21]. BeYDV has been extensively explored as a molecular tool for the expression of mainly pharmaceutically relevant proteins, such as vaccines, antibodies and enzymes [9], [21]. And recently it has also been used as a means to deliver reagents into plant cells to genetically engineer them [22].

Hefferon and co-workers were one of the first to design a vector derived from BeYDV. They expressed a synthetic version of Staphylococcus enterotoxin B (SEB) in tobacco NT-1 cells. The synthetic SEB sequence was placed under the control of a Cauliflower mosaic virus (CaMV) 35S constitutive promoter and flanked by the cis acting BeYDV LIR and SIR. The Rep encoding gene was provided in trans from a separate construct and also constitutively expressed from the CaMV 35S promoter. Constructs were co-delivered into NT-1 cells by bombardment [11]. They obtained expression levels of ≈0.025 mg SEB / kg of NT-1 cells. They showed that expression of SEB could be enhanced by 20 times by supplying Rep in trans compared to when no Rep was supplied. Overall they showed that BeYDV-based replicon systems promised enhancement of recombinant protein expression in plants [23].

In a more deconstructed approach, Mor et al. (2003) designed a replicon system similar to that of Hefferon and Dugdale (2003) in which the BeYDV MP and CP genes were replaced by the gene of interest (GUS), controlled by CaMV 35S promoter and flanked by the LIR and SIR sequences [24]. Since the CP can sequestrate viral ssDNA, preventing dsDNA to be formed [8], by removing the CP from the viral vector, expression levels can be increased. Removing non-essential features of the virus also gives more room for larger inserts and channels energy and building blocks that would be used to synthesize these proteins into expressing the recombinant protein [20]. Mor et al. obtained expression levels 40 times higher when supplying Rep as well as RepA than when no Rep/RepA was supplied. Showing that RepA also enhances expression levels, probably by making the cell environment more favorable for replication [24]. 

Regnard et al. (2010) designed a replicon vector, pRIC, based on the mild strain of BeYDV that contained the Rep/RepA coding regions in cis rather than in trans. This allowed the vector to autonomously replicate and thus generate high levels of gene copy number and in turn enhanced protein expression. They used N. benthamiana plants and Agrobacterium tumefaciens-mediated gene delivery. They obtained higher expression levels than previously described of three unrelated proteins: enhanced GFP, Human Papillomavirus type 16 major CP, L1, and a HIV-1 p24 antigen. Yields were higher when using the replicative vector than when compared to expression from a non-replicative A. tumefaciens expression vector: 550 mg ⁄ kg fresh leaf weight (FLW) vs. 337 mg L1 ⁄ kg FLW for L1 and 3.23 mg p24 ⁄ kg FLW vs. 0.95 mg p24 ⁄ kg FLW for p24. This study showed that autonomous replication of BeYDV-based vectors dramatically increases gene expression levels [25].

Huang et al. (2009) designed a three-component replicon system that consisted of a construct derived from a deconstructed version BeYDV similar to that described by Mor et al. (2003) containing the gene of interest expression cassette, a construct encoding for the Rep/RepA under CaMV 35S promoter control and a construct expressing the posttranscriptional gene silencing suppressor protein P19. They obtained 0.34 g of Norwalk virus CP (NVCP) / kg FLW and 0.8 g of hepatitis B core antigen (HBc) / kg FLW, which were able to form VLPs. In order to simplify the replicon system, they included the Rep/RepA sequences in cis. They obtained similar expression levels when using the simplified replicon, with or without P19 supplementation as when the three-component system was used [26].  Later they designed a single vector containing multiple replicon cassettes each flanked by a LIR and a SIR. The vector also contained the Rep/RepA sequences under LIR control. Co-delivering the single-vector replicon and a P19 expression vector, they expressed the light and heavy chain of an Ebola virus-targeting monoclonal antibody (mAB), 6D8. They obtained ≈0.5 g of 6D8 mAB / kg FLW which had been assembled correctly and could bind its antigen specifically. Expression levels were comparable to those obtained by Giritch et al. (2006) [27] using two vectors based on two non-competing RNA viruses. They speculated that using this single-vector multireplicon system, even four proteins could be expressed simultaneously using two vectors or placing expression cassettes in tandem  [28].

More recently, Moon et al. (2014) were able to express Brome mosaic virus (BMV) and Cucumber mosaic virus (CMV) VLPs at 0.5 and 1.0 g / kg FLW respectively, using a BeYDV-derived single-vector replicon system. This vector included the P19 coding sequence, the gene of interest as well as the Rep/RepA coding sequences in the same backbone. In this way enhanced expression of VLPs that can be used as carriers for nano-platforms with applications in material sciences and medicine was possible with only one agroinfiltration [29].

Finally, Baltes et al. (2014) demonstrated that BeYDV-based replicon system can be also used for plant genome engineering. They were able to deliver various nucleases (TALENs and CRISP/Cas system) as well as repair templates into tobacco cells and to regenerate plantlets with the desired DNA changes within 6 weeks. This highlighted the potential of vectors derived from BeYDV and other geminiviruses to be applied in the engineering of plants for, for example,  improvement of crop characteristics, crop resistance or in fundamental biology studies [22].

In conclusion, BeYDV is a small, dicotyledonous plant-infecting mastrevirus with apparently unlimited possible molecular applications.

References

[1] W. Zhang, N. H. Olson, T. S. Baker, L. Faulkner, M. Agbandje-McKenna, M. I. Boulton, J. W. Davies, and R. McKenna, “Structure of the Maize streak virus geminate particle.,” Virology, vol. 279, pp. 471–477, 2001.

[2] E. P. Rybicki and D. P. Martin, “Virus-derived ssDNA vectors for the expression of foreign proteins in plants,” Current Topics in Microbiology and Immunology, vol. 375, pp. 19–45, 2011.

[3] A. Varsani, J. Navas-Castillo, E. Moriones, C. Hernández-Zepeda, A. Idris, J. K. Brown, F. Murilo Zerbini, and D. P. Martin, “Establishment of three new genera in the family Geminiviridae: Becurtovirus, Eragrovirus and Turncurtovirus,” Archives of Virology, vol. 159, pp. 2193–2203, 2014.

[4] L. Liu, T. Van Tonder, G. Pietersen, J. W. Davies, and J. Stanley, “Molecular characterization of a subgroup I geminivirus from a legume in South Africa,” Journal of General Virology, vol. 78, pp. 2113–2117, 1997.

[5] J. Hadfield, J. E. Thomas, M. W. Schwinghamer, S. Kraberger, D. Stainton, A. Dayaram, J. N. Parry, D. Pande, D. P. Martin, and A. Varsani, “Molecular characterisation of dicot-infecting mastreviruses from Australia,” Virus Research, vol. 166, no. 1–2, pp. 13–22, 2012.

[6] R. P. Halley-Stott, F. Tanzer, D. P. Martin, and E. P. Rybicki, “The complete nucleotide sequence of a mild strain of Bean yellow dwarf virus,” Archives of Virology, vol. 152, pp. 1237–1240, 2007.

[7] K. E. Palmer and E. P. Rybicki, “The molecular biology of mastreviruses.,” Advances in virus research, vol. 50, pp. 183–234, 1998.

[8] L. Liu, J. W. Davies, and J. Stanley, “Mutational analysis of bean yellow dwarf virus, a geminivirus of the genus Mastrevirus that is adapted to dicotyledonous plants,” Journal of General Virology, vol. 79, pp. 2265–2274, 1998.

[9] Q. Chen, J. He, W. Phoolcharoen, and H. S. Mason, “Geminiviral vectors based on bean yellow dwarf virus for production of vaccine antigens and monoclonal antibodies in plants,” Human Vaccines, vol. 7, no. 3, pp. 331–338, Mar. 2011.

[10] L. Liu, K. Saunders, C. arole L. Thomas, J. W. Davies, and J. Stanley, “Bean yellow dwarf virus RepA, but not rep, binds to maize retinoblastoma protein, and the virus tolerates mutations in the consensus binding motif.,” Virology, vol. 256, pp. 270–279, 1999.

[11] K. L. Hefferon and B. Dugdale, “Independent expression of Rep and RepA and their roles in regulating bean yellow dwarf virus replication,” Journal of General Virology, vol. 84, pp. 3465–3472, 2003.

[12] C. Gutierrez, “Geminivirus DNA replication,” Cellular and Molecular Life Sciences, vol. 56. pp. 313–329, 1999.

[13] “Adult drawing grape leafhopper,” Koppert Biological Systems 9103. [Online]. Available: https://www.flickr.com/photos/koppert/2400156751/. [Accessed: 09-Feb-2015].

[14] “Phaseolus vulgaris,” Belgium, Prelude – Royal Museum for Central Africa – Tervuren. [Online]. Available: http://www.africamuseum.be/collections/external/prelude/view_plant?pi=09910. [Accessed: 09-Feb-2015].

[15] N. Nahid, I. Amin, S. Mansoor, E. P. Rybicki, E. Van Der Walt, and R. W. Briddon, “Two dicot-infecting mastreviruses (family Geminiviridae) occur in Pakistan,” Archives of Virology, vol. 153, pp. 1441–1451, 2008.

[16] G. Pogue and S. Holzberg, “Transient Virus Expression Systems for Recombinant Protein Expression in Dicot-and Monocotyledonous Plants,” in Plant Science, N. K. Dhal and S. C. Sahu, Eds. InTech, 2012, pp. 191–216.

[17] F. Sainsbury, P.-O. Lavoie, M.-A. D’Aoust, L.-P. Vézina, and G. P. Lomonossoff, “Expression of multiple proteins using full-length and deleted versions of cowpea mosaic virus RNA-2.,” Plant biotechnology journal, vol. 6, no. 1, pp. 82–92, Jan. 2008.

[18] E. P. Rybicki, “Plant-produced vaccines: promise and reality.,” Drug Discovery Today, vol. 14, no. 1–2, pp. 16–24, Jan. 2009.

[19] V. Yusibov, S. Rabindran, U. Commandeur, R. M. Twyman, and R. Fischer, “The potential of plant virus vectors for vaccine production.,” Drugs in R&D, vol. 7, no. 4, pp. 203–17, Jan. 2006.

[20] Y. Gleba, S. Marillonnet, and V. Klimyuk, “Plant Virus Vectors: Gene Expression Systems,” Encyclopedia of Virology, vol. 4, pp. 229–237, Apr. 2008.

[21] K. L. Hefferon, “DNA Virus Vectors for Vaccine Production in Plants: Spotlight on Geminiviruses,” Vaccines, vol. 2, no. 3, pp. 642–653, Aug. 2014.

[22] N. J. Baltes, J. Gil-Humanes, T. Cermak, P. a Atkins, and D. F. Voytas, “DNA replicons for plant genome engineering.,” The Plant cell, vol. 26, no. January, pp. 151–63, 2014.

[23] K. L. Hefferon and Y. Fan, “Expression of a vaccine protein in a plant cell line using a geminivirus-based replicon system,” Vaccine, vol. 23, pp. 404–410, 2004.

[24] T. S. Mor, Y.-S. Moon, K. E. Palmer, and H. S. Mason, “Geminivirus vectors for high-level expression of foreign proteins in plant cells.,” Biotechnology and bioengineering, vol. 81, pp. 430–437, 2003.

[25] G. L. Regnard, R. P. Halley-Stott, F. L. Tanzer, I. I. Hitzeroth, and E. P. Rybicki, “High level protein expression in plants through the use of a novel autonomously replicating geminivirus shuttle vector.,” Plant biotechnology journal, vol. 8, no. 1, pp. 38–46, Jan. 2010.

[26] Z. Huang, Q. Chen, B. Hjelm, C. Arntzen, and H. Mason, “A DNA replicon system for rapid high-level production of virus-like particles in plants.,” Biotechnology and bioengineering, vol. 103, no. 4, pp. 706–14, Jul. 2009.

[27] A. Giritch, S. Marillonnet, C. Engler, G. van Eldik, J. Botterman, V. Klimyuk, and Y. Gleba, “Rapid high-yield expression of full-size IgG antibodies in plants coinfected with noncompeting viral vectors.,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, vol. 103, no. 40, pp. 14701–6, Oct. 2006.

[28] Z. Huang, W. Phoolcharoen, H. Lai, K. Piensook, G. Cardineau, L. Zeitlin, K. J. Whaley, C. J. Arntzen, H. S. Mason, and Q. Chen, “High-level rapid production of full-size monoclonal antibodies in plants by a single-vector DNA replicon system.,” Biotechnology and bioengineering, vol. 106, no. 1, pp. 9–17, May 2010.

[29] K. Moon, J. Lee, S. Kang, M. Kim, H. S. Mason, J. Jeon, and H. Kim, “Overexpression and self-assembly of virus-like particles in Nicotiana benthamiana by a single-vector DNA replicon system.,” Applied microbiology and biotechnology, vol. 98, pp. 8281–90, 2014.

Tags:, , ,
Posted in biofarming, biotechnology, geminivirus | 2 Comments »

A feeling for the Molechism* – revisited

10 July, 2012

This is an update of a post I did on Alan Cann’s MicrobiologyBytes back in 2007, before i started ViroBlogy: I am doing this because (a) it’s mine, (b) I want to update it – and the MB version is archived, so I can’t.  So here we are again:

I think it’s permissible, after working on your favourite virus for over 20 years, to develop some sort of feeling for it: you know, the kind of insight that isn’t directly backed up by experiment, but that may very well be right. Or not – but in either case, it would take a deal of time and a fair bit of cash to prove or disprove, and would have sparked some useful discussion in the meantime. And then, of course, the insights you have into (insert favourite virus name here) – if correct – can usually be extended into the more general case, and if you are sufficiently distinguished, people may actually take them on board, and you will have contributed to Accepted Wisdom.

I can’t pretend – at least, outside of my office – to any such Barbara McClintock-like distinction; however, I have done a fair bit of musing on my little sphere of interest as it relates (or not) to the State of the Viral Universe, and I will share some of these rambles now with whomever is interested.

I have been in the same office now, and teaching the same course, more or less, for 32-odd years. In that time I have worked on the serology and epidemiology of the bromoviruses, cucumovirus detection, potyvirus phylogeny, geminivirus diversity and molecular biology, HIV and papillomavirus genetic diversity, and expressing various bits of viruses and other proteins in plants and in insect cells. However, much of my interest (if not my effort) in that time has been directed towards understanding how grass-infecting mastreviruses in particular interact with their environment and with each other, in the course of their natural transmission cycle.

Maize streak virus

Maxwell’s Demon (left, lower) and Martian Face (right, upper) visible on a MSV virion

Fascinating little things, mastreviruses: unique geminate capsid architecture, and at around a maximum of 2.8 kb of single-strand circular DNA, we thought they were the smallest DNA genomes known until the circoviruses and then the zoo of anello- and anello-like viruses were discovered. Their genomes code for only 4 proteins – two replication-associated, one movement and one capsid – yet we have managed to work on just one subgroup of mastrevirus species for 27 years, without exhausting its interest – at least, to us… (see PubMed list here). We also showed that one could see Martian faces quite distinctly on virions – and possibly even Maxwell’s Demon. But I digress….

Maize streak

Severe symptoms of MSV on sweetcorn

We have concentrated on the “African streak viruses” – related species Maize streak virus, Panicum streak virus, Digitaria streak virus, Sugarcane streak virus and friends – for two very simple reasons:
1. They occur in Africa, near us, and nowhere else;
2. Maize streak virus is the worst viral pathogen affecting maize in Africa.

So we get situational or niche advantage, and we get to work on an economically-important pathogen. One that was described – albeit as “…not of…contagious nature” – as early as 1901, no less.

Maize streak virus

Maize streak virus or MSV, like its relatives, is obligately transmitted by a leafhopper (generally Cicadulina mbila Naudé): this means we have a three-party interaction – of virus-host-vector – to consider when trying to understand the dynamics of its transmission. Actually, it’s more complicated than that: we have also increasingly to consider the human angle, given that the virus disease affects mainly the subsistence farming community in Africa, and that human activity has a large influence on the spread of the disease. So while considering just the virus – as complicated as that is – we have to remember that it is only part of the whole picture.

So how complicated is the virus? At first sight, not very: all isolates made from severe maize infections share around 97% of their genome sequence. However, however…that 3% of sequence variation hides a multitude of biological differences, and there is a range of relatives infecting grasses of all kinds, some of which differ by up to 35% in genome sequence. Moreover, maize is a crop plant first introduced to Africa a maximum of 500 years ago, so it is hardly a “natural” host – yet, all over Africa, it is infected by only a very narrow range of virus genotypes, from a background of very wide sequence diversity available.

So here’s an insight:

the host selects the virus that replicates best in it.

And lo, we found that in the Vaalharts irrigation area in the north of South Africa that the dominant virus genotype in winter wheat was a different strain – >10% sequence difference – to the one in the same field, in summer maize. Different grass species also have quite different strains or even species of streak viruses best adapted to them.

DendrogramNot all that profound a set of observations, perhaps, but they lead on to another insight:

streak viruses travel around as a cloud of variants or virus complex.

Not intuitively obvious, perhaps…but testable, and when we did, we found we were right: cloning virus genomes back out of maize or from a grass infected via leafhoppers gave a single predominant genotype in each case, with a number of other variants present as well. Looking further, we discovered that even quite different viruses could in fact trans-replicate each other: that is, the Rep/RepA complex of one virus could facilitate the replication of the genome of a virus differing by up to 35% in DNA sequence. We have also – we think – made nonsense of the old fancy that you could observe “host adaptation” of field isolates of MSV: we believe this was due to repeated selection by a single host genotype from the “cloud” of viruses transmitted during the natural infection cycle.

So, insight number three:

there is a survival benefit for the viruses in this strategy.

This is simple to understand, really, and relates to leafhopper biology as well as to host: the insects move around a lot, chasing juicy grasses, and it would be an obvious advantage to the streak virus complex to be able to replicate as a complex in each different host type – given that different virus genotypes have differential replication potential in the various backgrounds. This is quite significantly different, incidentally, to what happens with the very distantly-related (in terms of geological time) begomoviruses, or whitefly-transmitted geminiviruses: these typically do not trans-replicate each other across a gap of more than 10% of sequence difference.

Boring, I hear you say, but wait…. Add another factoid in, and profound insights start to emerge. In recent years, the cloud of protégés or virologist complex around me has accumulated to critical mass, and one of the most important things to emerge – apart from some frighteningly effective software for assessing recombination in viral genomes, which I wish he’d charge for – was Darren Martin’s finding that genome recombination is rife among African streak viruses. This was unexpected, given the expectation that DNA viruses simply don’t do that sort of thing; that promiscuous reassortment of components between genomes is a hallmark of RNA viruses. Makes sense in retrospect (an exact science), however, because of the constraints on DNA genomes: how else to explore sequence space, if the proof-reading is too good? And if you travel in a complex anyway…why not swap bits for biological advantage?

MSV web

Linkage map of the MSV genome, showing what interacts with what

So Darren swapped a whole lot of bits, in a tour-de-force of molecular virology, to create some 54 infectious chimaeric MSV genomes – and determined that

“The pathogenicity of chimeras was strongly influenced by the relatedness of their parental viruses and evidence was found of nucleotide sequence-dependent interactions between both coding and intergenic regions“.

In other words –new insight:

the whole genome is a pathogenicity determinant, and bits of it interact with other bits in unexpected ways.

At this point you could say “Hey, all his insights are in fact hypotheses!” – and you would be partially correct, except for

Profound Insight No. 1: hypotheses are the refuge of the linear-thinking.

Or its variant, found on my office wall:

“**c* the hypotheses, let’s just discover something”. I also have

“If at first you don’t succeed, destroy all evidence that you tried” and a number of exotic beer bottle labels on my wall – but I digress….

As an aside here, I am quite serious in disliking hypothesis-driven science: I think it is a irredeemably reductionist approach, which does not easily allow for Big Picture overviews, and which closes out many promising avenues of investigation or even of thought. And I teach people how to formulate them so they can get grants and publications in later life, but I still think HDS is a tyranny that should be actively subverted wherever possible.

Be all this as it may, now follows

Profound Insight No. 2: genome components may still be individually mobile even when covalently linked.

Now take a moment to think on this: recombination allows genes to swap around inside genetic backgrounds so as to constitute novel entities – and the “evolutionary value of exchanging a genome fragment is constrained by the number of ways in which the fragment interacts with the rest of the genome*“. Whether or not the genome is RNA, DNA, in one piece or divided. All of a sudden, the concept of a “virus genome” as a gene pool rather than a unitary thing becomes obvious – and so does the reductionism inherent in saying “this single DNA/RNA sequence is a virus”.

So try this on for size for a brand-new working definition of a virus – and

Profound Insight No. 3: a virus is an infectious acellular entity composed of compatible genomic components derived from a pool of genetic elements.

Sufficiently paradigm-shifting for you? Compare it to more classical definitions – yes, including one by AJ Cann, Esq. – and see how much simpler it is. It also opens up the possibility that ANY virus as currently recognised is simply an operational assembly of components, and not necessarily the final article at all.

Again, my favourite organisms supply good object examples: the begomoviruses – whitefly-transmitted geminiviruses –

  • may have one- or two-component genomes;
  • some of the singleton A-type components may pick up a B-type in certain circumstances;
  • some doubletons may lose their B without apparent effect in model hosts;
  • some A components may apparently share B components in natural infections;
  • the A and B components recombine like rabbits with cognate molecules (or Bs can pick up the intergenic region from As);
  • in many cases have one or more satellite ssDNAs (β DNA, or nanovirus-related components) associated with disease causation;

…and so on, and on…. An important thing to note here is the lab-rat viruses – those isolated early on, and kept in model plant species in greenhouses – often don’t exhibit any of these strangenesses, whereas field-isolated viruses often do.

Which tells you quite a lot about model systems, doesn’t it?

But this is not only true of plant viruses: the zoo of ssDNA anello-like viruses found in humans and in animals – with several very distantly-related viruses to be found in any individual, and up to 80% of humans infected – just keeps on getting bigger and weirder. Added to the original TT virus – named originally for the initials of the Japanese patient from whom it was isolated, and in a post hoc exercise of convoluted logic, named Torque teno virus (TTV) [why don’t people who work with human or animal viruses obey ICTV rules??] – are now Torque teno minivirus (TTMV) and “small anellovirus” SAV) – all of which have generic status. And all of which may be the same thing – as in, TTVs at a genome size of 3.6–3.8 kb may give rise to TTMVs (2.8-29 kb) and SAVs (2.4-2.6 kb) as deletion mutants as part of a population cloud, where the smaller variants are trans-replicated by the larger. Thus, a whole lot of what are being described as viruses – without fulfilling Koch’s Postulates, I might point out – are probably only “hopeful monsters” existing only as part of a population. Funnily enough, this sort of thing is much better explored in the ssDNA plant virus community, given that working with plant hosts is so much easier than with human or animal.

And now we can go really wide, and attempt to be profound on a global scale: it should not have escaped your notice that the greatest degree of diversity among organisms on this planet is that of viruses, and viruses that are found in seawater in particular. There is a truly mind-boggling number of different viruses in just one ml of seawater taken from anywhere on Earth, which leads respectable authors such as Curtis Suttle to speculate that viruses almost certainly have a significant influence on not only populations of all other marine organisms, but even on the carbon balance of the world’s oceans – and therefore of the planet itself.

Which leads to the final, and most obvious,

Profound Insight (No. 4): in order to understand viruses, we should all be working on seawater…. 

That is where the diversity is, after all; that is where the gene pool that gave rise to all viruses came from originally – and who knows what else is being

Hypolith – cyanobacteria-derived, probably – under a piece of Namib quartzite from near Gobabeb Research Station

cooked up down there?

And this is the major update: not only have I managed to get funded for a project on “Marine Viromics” from our local National Research Foundation – a process akin to winning the lottery, and about as likely to succeed – I am also collaborating with friends and colleagues from the Institute for Microbial Biotechnology and Metagenomics at the University of the Western Cape on viruses in desert soils, and associated with hypoliths– or algal growths found under quartzite rocks in extreme environments.

Thus, I shall soon be frantically learning how to deal with colossal amounts of sequence data, and worse, learning how to make sense of it.  We should have fun!

——————————————————————————————————————–

* And as a final curiosity, I find that while I – in common with the World Book Encyclop[a]edia and Learning Resources – take:mol|e|chism or mol|e|cism «MOL uh KIHZ uhm», noun. to mean any virus, viewed as an infective agent possessing the characteristics of both a living microorganism and a nonliving molecule; organule.
[molechism < mole(cule) + ch(emical) + (organ)ism; molecism < molec(ule) + (organ)ism] –
There is another meaning… something to do with sacrifice of children and burning in hellfire eternally. This is just to reassure you that this is not that.

Tags:, , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Evolution, General Virology, Viruses | 1 Comment »

On the utility of Pink Floyd’s “The Grand Vizier’s Garden Party” as a metaphor for virus multiplication

16 September, 2010


…which pretty much explains the concept…what’s that?  Why?  Well, because the above-mentioned song – off the very strange and very wonderful album Ummagumma, released in 1969 – incorporates three subsections.

From the tracklisting:

“The Grand Vizier’s Garden Party” (N Mason) – 8:44

  • Part 1: “Entrance” – 1:00
  • Part 2: “Entertainment” – 7:06
  • Part 3: “Exit” – 0:38

All clear now?  No?  Ah, well, you need to consult the relevant parts of the Web material, don’t you?  Which would be here, and here…and of course, we never got around to exit as such, so you may as well look here instead.

Which just goes to show that, however hard one tries, it is close to impossible to update a whole set of Web pages AND keep all the links current!  Ah, well – that’s an aspect of electronic teaching with its own comment, right here.

But I digress: “metaphor”, I said.  Something like a “simile”, only different, as I’ve heard it described.  And another digression, to cartoon country this time – which shows how we virologists normally treat metaphors and their filthy ilk.

And is it a good metaphor, you ask?  Well, yes – for one reason, because

  • first, students still know who Pink Floyd is/are, so they remember it better;
  • second, because it is a very simple encapsulation of the process;
  • third, because it neatly separates three crucial aspects of the virus life cycle –
  • and fourth, it gives you the opportunity to describe three very different kinds of strategy for messing with said life cycle.

And thinking of 4, and just of HIV for example, those would be:

  • entry inhibitors, like antibodies or fusion inhibitors
  • nucleoside analogue or non-nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitors, and
  • protease inhibitors to prevent polyprotein processing.

And I’ve been doing it for 25 years, and see no reason why I should stop using it now.  Or stop playing “Another Brick in the Wall” when I put up long definitions.   Or stop mentioning that Pink Floyd have the second-longest song title of which I am aware.  Or that Hoagy Carmichael* has the longest….

Enough said, probably.  Just to say that it helps make virology fun.  At least for me  B-)

* = I’m a Cranky Old Yank in a Clanky Old Tank on the Streets of Yokohama with my Honolulu Mama Doin’ Those Beat-o, Beat-o Flat-On-My-Seat-o, Hirohito Blues

Tags:, , , ,
Posted in General Virology | 4 Comments »

West Nile virus vaccine: almost a replicant

2 June, 2008

West Nile virus – a member of the family Flaviviridae – has insidiously spread halfway around the world from its origins in Africa, in just a few years.  It invaded the east coast of the USA, probably from the Middle East,  via either infected birds, mosquitoes, humans, or another vertebrate host in around 1999; since then it has spread all the way across the continent to the west coast, and has become truly endemic. 

Virions have a regular icosahedral-type structure, despite being enveloped, as a result of a structured nucleocapsid and a highly-structured array of envelope glycoprotein.  They contain a positive strand RNA genome of ~11 kb with a single long open reading frame that is translated as a polyprotein of about 3400 amino acids, which is then processed into individual regulatory and structural proteins.

The virus subtype spreading in North America – lineage 1 – causes encephalitis in humans, unlike the enzootic variant circulating in birds and animals in Africa.  It also cause severe mortality – near 100% in experimentally infected animals – among American Crows and other corvids: a feature of the spread of the disease has been dead crows found in and around towns in the USA.  A feature of lineage 1 viruses is their infection of horses and other equines as well – with up to one in three clinically-infected horses dying.  The human impact, however, is seen as a major problem: systemic febrile illness develops in ~20% of those infected with WNV, while severe neurologic illness developes in <1% of persons infected – with mortality rates of 5 -14% among persons with neurologic symptoms in recent US, Romanian, Russian, and Israeli outbreaks.

There has been a concentrated effort to develop a human vaccine or vaccines since the onset of the US epidemic – horse vaccines are already commercially available – and our knowledge of the virus has benefitted greatly as a result.  This includes a detailed structure for the virus, obtained by cryoelectron microscopy image reconstruction.

http://www.purdue.edu/uns/html4ever/031009.Kuhn.westnile.html

Purdue team solves structure of West Nile virus via kwout

 Now a team led by Alexander Khromykh from Brisbane in Queensland, Australia, writing in the May issue of Nature Biotechnology, have described a novel “single-round infectious particle” DNA vaccine against WNV which significantly increases protection in mice to lethal challenge with the live virus.   In the words of the authors:

“We augment the protective capacity of a capsid-deleted flavivirus DNA vaccine by co-expressing the capsid protein from a separate promoter. In transfected cells, the capsid-deleted RNA transcript is replicated and translated to produce secreted virus-like particles lacking the nucleocapsid. This RNA is also packaged with the help of co-expressed capsid protein to form secreted single-round infectious particles (SRIPs) that deliver the RNA into neighboring cells. In SRIP-infected cells, the RNA is replicated again and produces additional virus-like particles, but in the absence of capsid RNA no SRIPs are formed and no further spread occurs. Compared with an otherwise identical construct that does not encode capsid, our vaccine offers better protection to mice after lethal West Nile virus infection. It also elicits virus-neutralizing antibodies in horses. This approach may enable vaccination against pathogenic flaviviruses other than West Nile virus.”

Adapted by permission from Macmillan Publishers Ltd: Nature Biotechnology 26, 571 – 577, 20 April 2008 doi:10.1038/nbt1400 Single-round infectious particles enhance immunogenicity of a DNA vaccine against West Nile virus, David C Chang et al., copyright 2008

This is a very clever use of fundamental knowledge of virus structure and assembly: the virus envelope proteins – E and prM – can form budded particles if expressed in isolation; if expressed with the capsid protein, the particles encapsidate RNA with the appropriate encapsidation signal to form virions.  The DNA vaccine encodes a transcriptional unit corresponding to a viral genome which lacks only the capsid protein gene, as well as a separate capsid gene under back-to-back cytomegalovirus (CMV) promoters.  Thus, cells transfected with the DNA vaccine can produce both virus-like prM and E protein and membrane particles (VLPs), or pseudovirions which in addition contain a capsid and the engineered (=lacking capsid protein gene) genome.  While both are highly immunogenic, the pseudovirions can additionally infect other cells to release replicative genomic RNA, which can produce VLPs but not pseudovirions, as the capsid protein-encoding RNA is not encapsidated.  Thus, initial transfection leads to release of particles which allow a single subsequent round of VLP production, but no further spread of the replicative RNA.

A very clever trick – and worthy of being repeated for a number of related pathogenic flaviruses, including dengue and yellow fever viruses.

Even if the particles can’t pass the Voight-Kampff test…B-)

Tags:, , ,
Posted in Vaccines: General | 3 Comments »