How herpes viruses use the cell’s machinery to shut themselves off

Herpes viruses (simplex — for fever blisters, Kaposi’s sarcoma, herpes zoster — shingles) persist in the body in a latent state where they don’t don’t reproduce, don’t make many of their proteins and don’t make trouble.   Every now and then they reproduce and cause disease, as anyone with recurrent fever blisters will tell you.  Staying quiet allows them to avoid the immune system and essentially act as selfish DNA.

A recent paper [ PNAS vol. 120 e2212864120 ’23 ] shows that Kaposi’s Sarcoma Herpes Virus (KSHV) uses a circular RNA (circRNA) derived from a human oncogene called RELL1.  The circular RNA they induce is called hsa_circ-0001400.  In general circular RNAs are formed by back splicing of a 5′ splice to an upstream 3′ splice site.   One of their functions is to act as sponges for microRNAs as some contain multiple binding sites for them.  Some cells contain 25,000 of them.

Viruses are known to hijack cellular proteins to use for their own ends.  It isn’t clear how the herpes viruses stimulate formation of hsa_circ_0001400, but use it they do, as it promotes viral latency,  cell cycle genes and inhibits apoptosis.

This another example of the RNA world which supposedly existed before the DNA world, like DOS under the Windows operating system (forgotten but not gone)

The incredible information economy of frameshifting

Her fox and dog ate our pet rat

H erf oxa ndd oga teo urp etr at

He rfo xan ddo gat eou rpe tra t

The last two lines make no sense at all, but (neglecting the spaces) they have identical letter sequences.

Here are similar sequences of nucleotides making up the genetic code as transcribed into RNA

ATG CAT TAG CCG TAA GCC GTA GGA

TGC ATT AGC CGT AAG CCG TAG GA.

GCA TTA GCC TAA GCC GTA GGA ..

Again, in our genome there are no spaces between the triplets. But all the triplets you see are meaningful in the sense that they each code for one of the twenty amino acids (except for TAA which says stop). ATG codes for methionine (the purists will note that all the T’s should be U). I’m too lazy to look the rest up, but the ribosome doesn’t care, and will happily translate all 3 sequences into the sequential amino acids of a protein.

Both sets of sequences have undergone (reading) frame shifts.

A previous post https://luysii.wordpress.com/2014/10/13/the-bach-fugue-of-the-genome/ marveled about how something too small even to be called a virus coded for a protein whose amino acids were read in two different frames.

Frameshifting is used by viruses to get more mileage out of their genomes. Why? There is only so much DNA you can pack into the protein coat (capsids) of a virus.

[ Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. vol. 111 pp. 14675 – 14680 ’14 ] Usually DNA density in cell nuclei or bacteria is 5 – 10% of volume. However, in viral capsids it is 55% of volume. The pressure inside the viral capsid can reach ten atmospheres. Ejection is therefore rapid (60,000 basepairs/second).

The AIDS virus (HIV1) relies on frame shifting of its genome to produce viable virus. The genes for two important proteins (gag and pol) have 240 nucleotides (80 amino acids) in common. Frameshifting occurs to allow the 240 nucleotides to be read by the cell’s ribosomes in two different frames (not at once). Granted that there are 61 3 nucleotide combinations to code for only 20 amino acids, so some redundancy is built in, but the 80 amino acids coded by the two frames are usually quite different.

That the gag and pol proteins function at all is miraculous.

The phenomenon is turning out to be more widespread. [ Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. vol. 111 pp. E4342 – E4349 ’14 ] KSHV (Kaposi’s Sarcoma HerpesVirus) causes (what else?) Kaposi’s sarcoma, a tumor quite rare until people with AIDS started developing it (due to their lousy immune system being unable to contend with the virus). Open reading frame 73 (ORF73) codes for a major latency associated nuclear antigen 1 (LANA1). It has 3 domains a basic amino terminal region, an acidic central repeat region (divisible into CR1, CR2 and CR3) and another basic carboxy terminal region. LANA1 is involved in maintaning KSHV episomes, regulation of viral latency, transcriptional regulation of viral and cellular genes.

LANA1 is made of multiple high and lower molecular weight isoforms — e.g. a LANA ladder band pattern seen in immunoblotting.

This work shows that LANA1 (and also Epstein Barr Nuclear antigen 1` ) undergo highly efficient +1 and -2 programmed frameshifting, to generate previously undescribed alternative reading frame proteins in their repeat regions. Programmed frameshifting to generate multiple proteins from one RNA sequence can increase coding capacity, without increasing the size of the viral capsid.

The presence of similar repeat sequences in human genes (such as huntingtin — the defective gene in Huntington’s chorea) implies that we should look for frame shifting translation in ourselves as well as in viruses. In the case of mutant huntingtin frame shifting in the abnormally expanded CAG tracts rproduces proteins containing polyAlanine or polySerineArginine tracts.

Well G, A , T and C are the 1’s and 0’s of the way genetic information is stored in our genomic computer. It really isn’t surprising that the genome can be read in alternate frames. In the old days, textual information in bytes had parity bits to make sure the 1’s and 0’s were read in the correct frame. There is nothing like that in our genome (except for the 3 stop codons).

What is truly suprising it that reading in alternate frame produces ‘meaningful’ proteins. This gets us into philosophical waters. Clearly

Erf oxa ndd oga teo urp etr at

Rfo xan ddo gat eou rpe tra t

aren’t meaningful to us. Yet gag and pol are quite meaningful (even life and death meaningful) to the AIDS virus. So meaningful in the biologic sense, means able to function in the larger context of the cell. That really is the case for linguistic meaning. You have to know a lot about the world (and speak English) for the word cat to be meaningful to you. So meaning can never be defined by the word itself. Probably the same is true for concepts as well, but I’ll leave that to the philosophers, or any who choose to comment on this.