Abstract
The Alphaherpesvirinae include the neurotropic pathogens herpes simplex virus and varicella zoster virus of humans and pseudorabies virus of swine. These viruses establish lifelong latency in the nuclei of peripheral ganglia, but utilize the peripheral tissues those neurons innervate for productive replication, spread, and transmission. Delivery of virions from replicative pools to the sites of latency requires microtubule-directed retrograde axonal transport from the nerve terminus to the cell body of the sensory neuron. As a corollary, during reactivation newly assembled virions must travel along axonal microtubules in the anterograde direction to return to the nerve terminus and infect peripheral tissues, completing the cycle. Neurotropic alphaherpesviruses can therefore exploit neuronal microtubules and motors for long distance axonal transport, and alternate between periods of sustained plus end- and minus end-directed motion at different stages of their infectious cycle. This review summarizes our current understanding of the molecular details by which this is achieved.
Highlights
Members exhibit a range of tissue tropisms and replication strategies, with the subfamily Alphaherpesvirinae including those that replicate in peripheral tissue invade the nervous system to establish latency [1,2,3]
Our understanding of how Alphaherpesvirinae invade neurons and exploit their microtubule (MT)-directed trafficking machinery has benefited from synergistic studies of these human pathogens and alphaherpesviruses of veterinary importance, most notably the swine Varicellovirus pseudorabies virus
The inner tegument proteins UL36p and UL37p are recruited to the surface of the mature capsid shell early in this process, though whether this occurs in the nucleoplasm or following arrival of capsids into the cytoplasm is unclear for HSV-1 [12,95,104] and PRV [12,24,105,106]
Summary
The Herpesviridae is a large family of structurally complex enveloped dsDNA viruses that establish lifelong latent infections, with periodic reactivation, in their hosts [1]. The first task a newly transmitted alphaherpesvirus faces is to establish productive replication in somatic cells at the site of infection, generating an inoculum of viral particles for subsequent delivery to neurons [2,3]. This commonly occurs in mucosal epithelia such as the oral and anogenital mucosa for HSV-1 [4,5] and nasal and Viruses 2019, 11, 1165; doi:10.3390/v11121165 www.mdpi.com/journal/viruses. They travel by MT-directed are released and infect the termini of adjacent sensory neurons (Figure 1) [8,9,10] They travel by retrograde traffic along the axon along to the neuronal body.
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