Oeiras, 14.10. 2015

Researchers from the Structural Virology Lab at ITQB, together with scientists from the EMBL-Hamburg, Institute of Molecular Medicine and Harvard Medical School, have identified regions on a viral protein that are critical for herpes virus LANA protein to bend DNA, simply by a pivot motion. The work funded by the Harvard Medical School-Portugal Program was recently published in Nucleic Acids Research. The research combined severall techniques including X-ray crystallography, ITC and BioSAXS.

LANA pivot & twist

Original Article

http://nar.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2015/09/30/nar.gkv987.abstract

KSHV but not MHV-68 LANA induces a strong bend

upon binding to terminal repeat viral DNA

Author Summary

Nucl. Acids Res. (2015) doi: 10.1093/nar/gkv987
Herpesviruses establish life-long latent infections. During latency, Kaposi's sarcoma-associated herpesvirus (KSHV), persist as multicopy, circularized genomes in the cell nucleus and express a small subset of viral genes. KSHV latency-associated nuclear antigen (kLANA) is the predominant gene expressed during latent infection and causes several malignancies in humans. C-terminal LANA binds KSHV terminal repeat (TR) DNA to mediate DNA replication. We show how the closely related KSHV and MHV-68 viruses have evolved differently to bind TR viral DNA. A pivot region is identified in kLANA, but not in MHV-68 LANA, which allows greater freedom in its oligomeric assembly to persist in a human host.