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© 2024 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Notwithstanding the ProQuest Terms and Conditions, you may use this content in accordance with the terms of the License.

Abstract

The dengue virus is a single-stranded, positive-sense RNA virus that infects ~400 million people worldwide. Currently, there are no approved antivirals available. CRISPR-based screening methods have greatly accelerated the discovery of host factors that are essential for DENV infection and that can be targeted in host-directed antiviral interventions. In the present study, we performed a focused CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Palindromic Repeats) library screen to discover the key host factors that are essential for DENV infection in human Huh7 cells and identified the Protein Activator of Interferon-Induced Protein Kinase (PACT) as a novel pro-viral factor for DENV. PACT is a double-stranded RNA-binding protein generally known to activate antiviral responses in virus-infected cells and block viral replication. However, in our studies, we observed that PACT plays a pro-viral role in DENV infection and specifically promotes viral RNA replication. Knockout of PACT resulted in a significant decrease in DENV RNA and protein abundances in infected cells, which was rescued upon ectopic expression of full-length PACT. An analysis of global gene expression changes indicated that several ER-associated pro-viral genes such as ERN1, DDIT3, HERPUD1, and EIF2AK3 are not upregulated in DENV-infected PACT knockout cells as compared to infected wildtype cells. Thus, our study demonstrates a novel role for PACT in promoting DENV replication, possibly through modulating the expression of ER-associated pro-viral genes.

Details

Title
CRISPR Screen Reveals PACT as a Pro-Viral Factor for Dengue Viral Replication
Author
Shivaprasad, Shwetha 1   VIAFID ORCID Logo  ; Qiao, Wenjie 2 ; Kuo-Feng, Weng 2 ; Umashankar, Pavithra 3 ; Carette, Jan E 2 ; Sarnow, Peter 2   VIAFID ORCID Logo 

 Department of Microbiology & Immunology, Stanford University SOM, Stanford, CA 94305, USA; [email protected] (W.Q.); [email protected] (J.E.C.); [email protected] (P.S.); Molecular Biology and Genetics Unit, Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research, Bengaluru 560064, Karnataka, India; [email protected] 
 Department of Microbiology & Immunology, Stanford University SOM, Stanford, CA 94305, USA; [email protected] (W.Q.); [email protected] (J.E.C.); [email protected] (P.S.) 
 Molecular Biology and Genetics Unit, Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research, Bengaluru 560064, Karnataka, India; [email protected] 
First page
725
Publication year
2024
Publication date
2024
Publisher
MDPI AG
e-ISSN
19994915
Source type
Scholarly Journal
Language of publication
English
ProQuest document ID
3059793078
Copyright
© 2024 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Notwithstanding the ProQuest Terms and Conditions, you may use this content in accordance with the terms of the License.