Herpes Simplex Virus 1 Serine Protease VP24 Blocks the DNA-Sensing Signal Pathway by Abrogating Activation of Interferon Regulatory Factor 3
Bibliographic record
Abstract
UNLABELLED: The interferon (IFN)-mediated antiviral response is a central aspect of host defense; however, viruses have evolved multiple strategies to counteract IFN-mediated responses in order to successfully infect the host. Herpes simplex virus 1 (HSV-1), a typical human-restricted DNA virus, is capable of counteracting host immune responses via several distinct viral proteins, thus establishing a lifelong latent infection. In this study, we demonstrate that the VP24 protein, a serine protease of HSV-1 essential for the formation and maturation of capsids, is a novel antagonist of the beta interferon (IFN-β) pathway. Here, VP24 was shown for the first time to dampen interferon stimulatory DNA (ISD)-triggered IFN-β production and inhibit IFN-β promoter activation induced by cyclic GMP-AMP synthase (cGAS) and stimulator of interferon genes (STING) and by STING, respectively. Further study demonstrated that ectopic expression of VP24 selectively blocked IFN regulatory factor 3 (IRF3) but not NF-κB promoter activation. In addition, VP24 was demonstrated to downregulate ISD-induced phosphorylation and dimerization of IRF3 during HSV-1 infection with a VP24 stable knockdown human foreskin fibroblast cell line. The underlying molecular mechanism is that VP24 abrogates the interaction between TANK-binding kinase 1 (TBK1) and IRF3, hence impairing IRF3 activation. These results illustrate that VP24 is able to block the production of IFN-β by inhibiting IRF3 activation, which may represent a critical adaptation to enable viral effective replication within the host. IMPORTANCE: This study demonstrated that HSV-1 protein VP24 could inhibit IFN-β production and promoter activation triggered by ISD, cGAS and STING and by STING, respectively. VP24 selectively blocked IRF3 promoter activation and ISD-induced phosphorylation and dimerization of IRF3 without affecting the NF-κB promoter activation during viral infection. VP24 also inhibited IRF3 activation by impeding the interaction between TBK1 and IRF3 during viral infection. This study provides new insights into the immune evasion mediated by HSV-1 and identifies VP24 as a crucial effector for HSV-1 to evade the host DNA-sensing signal pathway.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".