Tegument Protein ORF45 Plays an Essential Role in Virion Morphogenesis of Murine Gammaherpesvirus 68

Xing Jia; Sheng Shen; Ying Lv; Ziwei Zhang; Haitao Guo; Hongyu Deng

doi:10.1128/JVI.03231-15

Tegument Protein ORF45 Plays an Essential Role in Virion Morphogenesis of Murine Gammaherpesvirus 68

^aChinese Academy of Sciences Key Laboratory of Infection and Immunity, Institute of Biophysics, Beijing, People's Republic of China
^bUniversity of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, People's Republic of China
^cCAS Center for Excellence in Biomacromolecules, Institute of Biophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, People’s Republic of China

R. M. Longnecker, Editor

Northwestern University

ABSTRACT

Tegument proteins play critical roles in herpesvirus morphogenesis. ORF45 is a conserved tegument protein of gammaherpesviruses; however, its role in virion morphogenesis is largely unknown. In this work, we determined the ultrastructural localization of murine gammaherpesvirus 68 (MHV-68) ORF45 and found that this protein was incorporated into virions around the site of host-derived vesicles. Notably, the absence of ORF45 inhibited nucleocapsid egress and blocked cytoplasmic virion maturation, demonstrating that ORF45 is essential for MHV-68 virion morphogenesis.

FOOTNOTES

Received 26 December 2015.
Accepted 17 May 2016.
Accepted manuscript posted online 25 May 2016.

Address correspondence to Hongyu Deng, hydeng{at}moon.ibp.ac.cn.
X.J. and S.S. contributed equally to this work.
Citation Jia X, Shen S, Lv Y, Zhang Z, Guo H, Deng H. 2016. Tegument protein ORF45 plays an essential role in virion morphogenesis of murine gammaherpesvirus 68. J Virol 90:7587–7592. doi:10.1128/JVI.03231-15.