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Journal of Virology, November 2004, p. 12668-12671, Vol. 78, No. 22
0022-538X/04/$08.00+0 DOI: 10.1128/JVI.78.22.12668-12671.2004
Copyright © 2004, American Society for Microbiology. All Rights Reserved.
Structure and Polymorphism of the UL6 Portal Protein of Herpes Simplex Virus Type 1
Benes L. Trus,1,2
Naiqian Cheng,2
William W. Newcomb,3
Fred L. Homa,4
Jay C. Brown,3 and
Alasdair C. Steven2*
Imaging Sciences Laboratory, Division of Computational Bioscience, Center for Information Technology,1
Laboratory of Structural Biology Research, National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland,2
Department of Microbiology and Cancer Center, University of Virginia Health System, Charlottesville, Virginia,3
Department of Molecular Genetics and Biochemistry, University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania4
Received 10 May 2004/
Accepted 23 June 2004

ABSTRACT
By electron microscopy and image analysis, we find that baculovirus-expressed
UL6 is polymorphic, consisting of rings of 11-, 12-, 13-, and
14-fold symmetry. The 12-mer is likely to be the oligomer incorporated
into procapsids: at a resolution of 16 Å, it has an axial
channel, peripheral flanges, and fits snugly into a vacant vertex
site. Its architecture resembles those of bacteriophage portal/connector
proteins.

TEXT
The herpes simplex virus type 1 (HSV-1) capsid initially assembles
as a precursor particle or procapsid that transforms into the
mature capsid (
15,
19). During maturation, the internal scaffolding
protein is expelled after processing by the viral protease,
and the procapsid shell undergoes a stabilizing structural transition
(
10). In these properties, HSV-1 follows the paradigm previously
determined in studies of double-stranded DNA bacteriophages
(
2,
3,
9,
11): as with the phages, it is likely that HSV-1 capsid
maturation accompanies DNA packaging in vivo. Since assembly
precedes packaging, how does DNA enter the capsid? Bacteriophages
solve this problem by installing, at one of the capsid's 12
icosahedral vertices, a dodecameric ring that serves as the
portal channel via which DNA is packaged (
20). This protein
is also called the connector, because it serves as the attachment
site for the phage tail. In 2001, Newcomb et al. (
16) reported
several lines of evidence strongly suggesting that UL6 is the
portal of HSV-1. In immunogold electron microscopy (EM) experiments,
they observed that an anti-UL6 antibody labeled one vertex site
per capsid. They also expressed UL6 in a recombinant baculovirus
system and examined the product by EM. Negative staining revealed
ring-like molecules with peripheral petals, and scanning transmission
EM mass measurements yielded a broad distribution that peaked
at a mass corresponding to

12 subunits. In the present study,
we have extended the structural investigation of UL6.
Although the evidence so far supports the view that phage portals in capsids are 12-mers (6, 13, 14), 13-mers have also been detected when the portals of T7 (12), T3 (21), and SPP1 (7) have been overexpressed in bacteria, and polymorphism has also been observed with the P22 portal (5). The width of the distribution of UL6 mass measurements (700 to 1,200 kDa) (16) suggested that this (baculovirus) expression product is also polymorphic, but background noise in the micrographs could not be ruled out as an explanation for the observed width. We addressed this question by applying a symmetry detection algorithm to electron micrographs of negatively stained UL6 molecules. The predominant appearance is of round particles about 150 Å across, with stain accumulating in the center (Fig. 1a). It follows that either the molecules are rings that preferentially present axial projections (top views) or they are hollow spheres that may present a variety of views. We analyzed the rotational power spectra of 725 particles with the Rotastat algorithm (12), which assays whether any orders of symmetry are more strongly represented in the data set than in a reference set of background images that is assumed to be nonsymmetric. Statistical significance is expressed in terms of P values by a t test. At the stringent confidence level of P < 106, we found that 11-, 12-, and 13-fold symmetries were present. At the lower but also significant confidence level of P < 104, 14-fold symmetry was detected.
These particles were classified on the basis of the relative
strengths of these harmonics in their rotational power spectra.
Within each rotamer class, the images were aligned and averaged.
The results, shown in Fig.
1b to g for the three prevalent classes,
reveal 11-mers, 12-mers, and 13-mers, each with a strongly staining
central feature

40 Å across, surrounded by petals. These
images have resolutions of

26 Å. We conclude that UL6
is indeed polymorphic, with a wider range of polymorphism than
has hitherto been detected among overexpressed phage portal
proteins. Because the symmetry detection algorithm yielded clear-cut
answers, we infer that UL6 tends to present top views.
3D structure.
Our goal was to calculate the structure of UL6 from cryoelectron micrographs, using an iterative projection-matching method (1). However, certain complications had to be addressed. First, for three-dimensional (3D) analysis of ring-like oligomers, side views are more conducive than top views, because a preponderance of top views limits the resolution in the axial dimension. However, UL6 preferentially presents top views when negatively stained on carbon films. Such also turned out to be the case for vitrified specimens on holey carbon films. We addressed this problem by collecting data on tilted specimens. Second, we had to generalize the projection-matching scheme to include multiple models corresponding to the various rotamers. Third, we had to acquire an appropriate starting model and then demonstrate that the final result was not biased by that choice. Although UL6 is fairly large (889 kDa for the 12-mer), there is little differential contrast in cryomicrographs to discriminate between different views and different rotamers (Fig. 2a). Accordingly, we used a two-step approach, first calculating 3D models from images of negatively stained specimens which have stronger contrast despite poorer structural preservation and then using these models as the starting point for cryo-EM reconstruction.
For an initial model, we needed a barrel-like particle of the
correct symmetry and about the right size, anticipating that
the structural information implicit in the micrographs would
gradually impose the correct structural details as the calculation
proceeded. For this purpose, we chose to use the

29 portal/
connector which has been resolved at high resolution (
8,
18).
We band limited the PDB 1FOU crystal structure (
18) to a resolution
of 35 Å and expanded it isotropically to compensate for
the UL6 subunit being larger (74 versus 36 kDa) (Fig.
3a). Using
models with 11-, 12-, and 13-fold symmetry, 5,352 negatively
stained images were analyzed. To minimize the risk of incorrectly
identified orientations, a conservative threshold was imposed
on their correlation coefficients. This procedure led to a 12-fold
model with a resolution of 29 Å (Fig.
3c): the 11-fold
and 13-fold density maps were similar but contained more noise
(data not shown).
These models were fed into the cryo-EM analysis. Roughly half
of the 48 micrographs represented specimens that had been tilted
by 10 to 45 degrees. These data eventually yielded the dodecamer
shown in Fig.
2b to i and Fig.
3d, which is based on 3,477 particles
and has a resolution of 16 Å. We believe that this structure
is not biased by the choice of starting model for the following
reasons. (i) The final model is markedly and stably different
from the starting model in terms of its internal cavity and
the position and shape of the peripheral flanges. (ii) The results
for the 11-mer and 13-mer are similar except for the order of
rotational symmetry, albeit of lower resolution (data not shown).
(iii) We performed a control experiment with an entirely different
starting model, in this case, a computer-generated construction
based on the cartoon in Fig. 5D of reference
16 (Fig.
3b). It
led to essentially the same structure.
The UL6 dodecamer is
130 Å long with a circumscribing diameter of
155 Å. Its two ends are distinct: at one end (Fig. 2d), a hollow cylinder about 65 Å across protrudes, which is plugged into a wider cylinder about 90 Å across at the other end, with a two-tiered outer ring in the central region. The connections between the two cylinders are rather tenuous. In overall shape, the UL6 portal resembles the SPP1 connector (17) more closely than that of
29 (8, 18). We have not yet been able to determine the handedness of the portal, nor is it clear which end is exposed on the outer surface of the capsid. However, docking experiments with a capsid model (4) from which one penton had been computationally excised showed that the wider end fits snugly into a vacant vertex (Fig. 4), whereas the other end is too narrow to make extensive contact with the surrounding hexons. This result favors the former orientation, provided that insertion of UL6 at a vertex site does not induce major conformational changes in the surrounding VP5 molecules.
In conclusion, the architecture of UL6, including its continuous
axial channel and set of peripheral flange-like domains reproduces
those of bacteriophage portal or connectors; moreover, its dimensions
are compatible with those of the vertex site. These observations
firmly support the proposition that UL6 is also a portal protein.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We thank D. Belnap, B. Heymann, E. Kocsis, T. Ishikawa, and
M. McAuliffe, for help with programming and for providing software,
L. You for scanning micrographs, and D. Thomsen for assistance
with baculovirus expression.
This work was supported in part by the NIH IATAP program (to A.C.S.) and by NIH grant 41644 (to J.C.B.).

FOOTNOTES
* Corresponding author. Mailing address: Laboratory of Structural Biology Research, National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases, National Institutes of Health, Building 50, Room 1517, MSC 8025, 50 South Dr., Bethesda, MD 20892-8025. Phone: (301) 496-0132. Fax: (301) 443-7651. E-mail:
Alasdair_Steven{at}nih.gov.


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Journal of Virology, November 2004, p. 12668-12671, Vol. 78, No. 22
0022-538X/04/$08.00+0 DOI: 10.1128/JVI.78.22.12668-12671.2004
Copyright © 2004, American Society for Microbiology. All Rights Reserved.
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