Identification of conserved residues in hepatitis C virus envelope glycoprotein E2 that modulate virus dependence on CD81 and SRB1 entry factors.

ABSTRACT:

Unlabelled

In spite of the high variability of its sequence, hepatitis C virus (HCV) envelope glycoprotein E2 contains several conserved regions. In this study, we explored the structural and functional features of the highly conserved E2 segment from amino acid (aa) 502 to 520, which had been proposed as a fusion peptide and shown to strongly overlap a potential conserved neutralizing epitope. For this purpose, we used reverse genetics to introduce point mutations within this region, and we characterized the phenotypes of these mutants in the light of the recently published structure of E2. The functional analyses showed that their phenotypes are in agreement with the positions of the corresponding residues in the E2 crystal structure. In contrast, our data ruled out the involveme

SUBMITTER: Lavie M 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4178871 | biostudies-literature | 2014 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature