RESEARCH ARTICLE
The Stimulatory Mechanism of Hepatitis C Virus NS5A Protein on the NS5B Catalyzed Replication Reaction In Vitro
Elizabeth M Quezada 1, 2, Caroline M Kane 1, *
Article Information
Identifiers and Pagination:
Year: 2013Volume: 7
First Page: 11
Last Page: 14
Publisher ID: TOBIOCJ-7-11
DOI: 10.2174/1874091X01307010011
Article History:
Received Date: 10/3/2012Revision Received Date: 18/4/2012
Acceptance Date: 24/4/2012
Electronic publication date: 31/1/2013
Collection year: 2013
open-access license: This is an open access article licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/) which permits unrestricted, non-commercial use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the work is properly cited.
Abstract
The Hepatitis C Virus RNA dependent RNA polymerase, NS5B, is stimulated by the NS5A protein in vitro. To explore this stimulatory mechanism, we compared the activity of a mutant of NS5B containing a deletion of the β-loop region with that of the full length NS5B in response to NS5A. While the NS5A protein does stimulate full length NS5B, NS5A does not stimulate the NS5B deletion mutant during either replication initiation or elongation. This result suggests that the activation mechanism might involve a NS5A-mediated conformational change of the β-loop of NS5B. Such a conformational change would be predicted to prevent steric clash of the RNA template and newly synthesized RNA product. Consistent with this hypothesis, RNA binding is enhanced when the full length NS5B and NS5A are incubated with RNA, but RNA binding is unchanged with incubation of NS5A and the NS5B β-loop deletion mutant.
