Min Fang
Chinese Academy of Sciences, China
Title: Suppression of Rac1 Signaling by Viral NS1 Can Facilitate Influenza A Virus Replication
Biography
Biography: Min Fang
Abstract
Influenza A virus (IAV) is a major human pathogen with the potential to become pandemic. IAV contains only eight RNA segments, thus, the virus must fully exploit the host cellular machinery to facilitate its own replication. In an effort to comprehensively characterize the host machinery taken over by IAV in mammalian cells, we generated stable A549 cell lines with over-expression of the viral NS1 protein to investigate potential host factors which might be modulated by NS1 protein. We found that viral NS1 protein directly interacted with cellular Rac1 and facilitates viral replication. Further researches revealed that NS1 can down-regulates the activity of Rac1 via post-translational modifications. Therefore, our results demonstrated that the IAV blocked Rac1-mediated host cell signaling transduction to facilitate its own replication through the NS1 protein. Our findings provide a novel insight into the mechanism of IAV replication and also indicate new avenues for the development of potential therapeutic targets.