Nature 483: 428-33 (March 14, 2012)
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Nature 483: 428–433
Suppression of the antiviral response by an influenza histone mimic
Ivan Marazzi, Jessica S. Y. Ho, Jaehoon Kim, Balaji Manicassamy, Scott Dewell, Randy A. Albrecht, Chris W. Seibert, Uwe Schaefer, Kate L. Jeffrey, Rab K. Prinjha, Kevin Lee, Adolfo García-Sastre, Robert G. Roeder and Alexander Tarakhovsky
We describe a novel mechanism by which influenza virus affects host cells through the interaction of influenza non-structural protein 1 (NS1) with the infected cell epigenome. We show that the NS1 protein of influenza A H3N2 subtype possesses a histone-like sequence (histone mimic) that is used by the virus to target the human PAF1 transcription elongation complex (hPAF1C). We demonstrate that binding of NS1 to hPAF1C depends on the NS1 histone mimic and results in suppression of hPAF1C-mediated transcriptional elongation.
