SciLifeLab Uppsala PhD&Postdoc seminar
May 10 @ 11:00 – 11:30 CEST
Welcome to SciLifeLab Uppsala PhD&Postdoc seminars!
We are very happy to host exciting talks by PhD students and Postdocs from a great variety of fields within SciLifeLab.
Speaker: Jinlin Li, Researcher at the Heparan Sulfate Biology group (Jinlin Li’s lab), Dept. of Medical Biochemistry and Microbiology
Title: Heparanase attenuates ZIKV infection by impeding the stability of viral protein
Summary: Heparanase (Hpa) is the only endoglycosidase enzyme in mammalian cells capable of cleaving heparan sulfate. In addition to the well-known functions in the regulation of glycosaminoglycans integrity, accumulating evidence indicate Hpa plays vital roles in virus infection, while the mechanisms are not yet fully understood, especially in RNA virus infection. In this study, we found Zika virus (ZIKV) reduced the expression of Hpa at the late life cycle of viral infection. Overexpression of wild-type Hpa but not the inactive enzymatic mutant (Hpa-DM) in Huh7 cells dramatically decreased the production of infectious virions. These findings were further confirmed by the results from Mouse Embryonic Fibroblasts (MEF) cells that knock-out of Hpa enhanced ZIKV production, while overexpression of Hpa suppressed the production of virions. Further investigations indicated that overexpression of Hpa in Huh7 cells exhibited no obvious effects on ZIKV’s attachment/entry and replication steps, but resulted in a significant downregulation of ZIKV envelope protein (E). Hpa was also shown to specifically degrade E protein when performed co-transfection of plasmids encoding Hpa and viral proteins in HEK-293T cells. Altogether, our study discovered an unrecognized role of Hpa in virus infection and demonstrated that Hpa serves as a restriction factor for ZIKV infection.
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