Exploiting Genetic Interference for Antiviral Therapy.

Rapidly evolving viruses are a major threat to human health. Such viruses are often highly pathogenic (e.g., influenza virus, HIV, Ebola virus) and routinely circumvent therapeutic intervention through mutational escape. Error-prone genome replication generates heterogeneous viral populations that rapidly adapt to new selection pressures, leading to resistance that emerges with treatment. However, population heterogeneity bears a cost: when multiple viral variants replicate within a cell, they can potentially interfere with each other, lowering viral fitness. This genetic interference can be exploited for antiviral strategies, either by taking advantage of a virus's inherent genetic diversity or through generating de novo interference by engineering a competing genome. Here, we discuss two such antiviral strategies, dominant drug targeting and therapeutic interfering particles. Both strategies harness the power of genetic interference to surmount two particularly vexing obstacles-the evolution of drug resistance and targeting therapy to high-risk populations-both of which impede treatment in resource-poor settings.

Transient Thresholding: A Mechanism Enabling Noncooperative Transcriptional Circuitry to Form a Switch.

Threshold generation in fate-selection circuits is often achieved through deterministic bistability, which requires cooperativity (i.e., nonlinear activation) and associated hysteresis. However, the Tat positive-feedback loop that controls HIV's fate decision between replication and proviral latency lacks self-cooperativity and deterministic bistability. Absent cooperativity, it is unclear how HIV can temporarily remain in an off-state long enough for the kinetically slower epigenetic silencing mechanisms to act-expression fluctuations should rapidly trigger active positive feedback and replication, precluding establishment of latency. Here, using flow cytometry and single-cell imaging, we find that the Tat circuit exhibits a transient activation threshold. This threshold largely disappears after ∼40 h-accounting for the lack of deterministic bistability-and promoter activation shortens the lifetime of this transient threshold. Continuous differential equation models do not recapitulate this phenomenon. However, chemical reaction (master equation) models where the transcriptional transactivator and promoter toggle between inactive and active states can recapitulate the phenomenon because they intrinsically create a single-molecule threshold transiently requiring excess molecules in the inactive state to achieve at least one molecule (rather than a continuous fractional value) in the active state. Given the widespread nature of promoter toggling and transcription factor modifications, transient thresholds may be a general feature of inducible promoters.

An SOS-regulated type 2 toxin-antitoxin system.

The Escherichia coli chromosome encodes seven demonstrated type 2 toxin-antitoxin (TA) systems: cassettes of two or three cotranscribed genes, one encoding a stable toxin protein that can cause cell stasis or death, another encoding a labile antitoxin protein, and sometimes a third regulatory protein. We demonstrate that the yafNO genes constitute an additional chromosomal type 2 TA system that is upregulated during the SOS DNA damage response. The yafNOP genes are part of the dinB operon, of which dinB underlies stress-induced mutagenesis mechanisms. yafN was identified as a putative antitoxin by homology to known antitoxins, implicating yafO (and/or yafP) as a putative toxin. Using phage-mediated cotransduction assays for linkage disruption, we show first that yafN is an essential gene and second that it is essential only when yafO is present. Third, yafP is not a necessary part of either the toxin or the antitoxin. Fourth, although DinB is required, the yafNOP genes are not required for stress-induced mutagenesis in the Escherichia coli Lac assay. These results imply that yafN encodes an antitoxin that protects cells against a yafO-encoded toxin and show a protein-based TA system upregulated by the SOS response.

Dominant drug targets suppress the emergence of antiviral resistance.

The emergence of drug resistance can defeat the successful treatment of pathogens that display high mutation rates, as exemplified by RNA viruses. Here we detail a new paradigm in which a single compound directed against a 'dominant drug target' suppresses the emergence of naturally occurring drug-resistant variants in mice and cultured cells. All new drug-resistant viruses arise during intracellular replication and initially express their phenotypes in the presence of drug-susceptible genomes. For the targets of most anti-viral compounds, the presence of these drug-susceptible viral genomes does not prevent the selection of drug resistance. Here we show that, for an inhibitor of the function of oligomeric capsid proteins of poliovirus, the expression of drug-susceptible genomes causes chimeric oligomers to form, thus rendering the drug-susceptible genomes dominant. The use of dominant drug targets should suppress drug resistance whenever multiple genomes arise in the same cell and express products in a common milieu.

Interstitial contacts in an RNA-dependent RNA polymerase lattice.

Catalytic activities can be facilitated by ordered enzymatic arrays that co-localize and orient enzymes and their substrates. The purified RNA-dependent RNA polymerase from poliovirus self-assembles to form two-dimensional lattices, possibly facilitating the assembly of viral RNA replication complexes on the cytoplasmic face of intracellular membranes. Creation of a two-dimensional lattice requires at least two different molecular contacts between polymerase molecules. One set of polymerase contacts, between the "thumb" domain of one polymerase and the back of the "palm" domain of another, has been previously defined. To identify the second interface needed for lattice formation and to test its function in viral RNA synthesis, we used a hybrid approach of electron microscopic and biochemical evaluation of both wild-type and mutant viral polymerases to evaluate computationally generated models of this second interface. A unique solution satisfied all constraints and predicted a two-dimensional structure formed from antiparallel arrays of polymerase fibers that use contacts from the flexible amino-terminal region of the protein. Enzymes that contained mutations in this newly defined interface did not form lattices and altered the structure of wild-type lattices. When reconstructed into virus, mutations that disrupt lattice assembly exhibited growth defects, synthetic lethality or both, supporting the function of the oligomeric lattice in infected cells. Understanding the structure of polymerase lattices within the multimeric RNA-dependent RNA polymerase complex should facilitate antiviral drug design and provide a precedent for other positive-strand RNA viruses.