Vaccinia virus-free recovery of vesicular stomatitis virus.

The advent of reverse-genetics represents a powerful new approach to elucidate aspects of negative-sense RNA virus replication. The reverse-genetics system established previously for vesicular stomatitis virus (VSV) required four plasmids encoding the nucleoprotein (N), phosphoprotein (P), polymerase (L), and the full-length, anti-genomic RNA. Transcription to yield the antigenomic RNA as well as the N, P, and L, mRNAs was initiated by bacteriophage T7 polymerase expressed from a recombinant Vaccinia virus. In this report, we describe the successful recovery of infectious VSV in the absence of Vaccinia virus. The N, P, and L genes of VSV were inserted downstream of both the T7 promoter and an internal ribosomal entry site (IRES element). T7 polymerase was expressed constitutively from BSR-T7/5 cells. RTPCR was used to confirm that the recovered VSV was derived from transfected DNA. Virion protein profile, CPE in tissue culture, and virus titer of the recombinant VSV were indistinguishable from those of parental VSV. Thus, the need for Vaccinia virus is eliminated with this system, making it an attractive, alternative approach for the recovery of infectious VSV from DNA.

A PPxY motif within the VP40 protein of Ebola virus interacts physically and functionally with a ubiquitin ligase: implications for filovirus budding.

VP40, the putative matrix protein of both Ebola and Marburg viruses, possesses a conserved proline-rich motif (PY motif) at its N terminus. We demonstrate that the VP40 protein can mediate its own release from mammalian cells, and that the PY motif is important for this self-exocytosis (budding) function. In addition, we used Western-ligand blotting to demonstrate that the PY motif of VP40 can mediate interactions with specific cellular proteins that have type I WW-domains, including the mammalian ubiquitin ligase, Nedd4. Single point mutations that disrupted the PY motif of VP40 abolished the PY/WW-domain interactions. Significantly, the full-length VP40 protein was shown to interact both physically and functionally with full-length Rsp5, a ubiquitin ligase of yeast and homolog of Nedd4. The VP40 protein was multiubiquitinated by Rsp5 in a PY-dependent manner in an in vitro ubiquitination assay. These data demonstrate that the VP40 protein of Ebola virus possesses a PY motif that is functionally similar to those described previously for Gag and M proteins of specific retroviruses and rhabdoviruses, respectively. Last, these studies imply that VP40 likely plays an important role in filovirus budding, and that budding of retroviruses, rhabdoviruses, and filoviruses may proceed via analogous mechanisms.