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Reporter and Curator: Dr. Sudipta Saha, Ph.D.

Once herpes simplex infects a person, the virus goes into hiding inside nerve cells, hibernating there for life, periodically waking up from its sleep to reignite infection, causing cold sores or genital lesions to recur. Research from Harvard Medical School showed that the virus uses a host protein called CTCF, or cellular CCCTC-binding factor, to display this type of behavior. Researchers revealed with experiments on mice that CTCF helps herpes simplex regulate its own sleep-wake cycle, enabling the virus to establish latent infections in the body’s sensory neurons where it remains dormant until reactivated. Preventing that latency-regulating protein from binding to the virus’s DNA, weakened the virus’s ability to come out of hiding.

Herpes simplex virus’s ability to go in and out of hiding is a key survival strategy that ensures its propagation from one host to the next. Such symptom-free latency allows the virus to remain out of the reach of the immune system most of the time, while its periodic reactivation ensures that it can continue to spread from one person to the next. On one hand, so-called latency-associated transcript genes, or LAT genes, turn off the transcription of viral RNA, inducing the virus to go into hibernation, or latency. On the other hand, a protein made by a gene called ICP0 promotes the activity of genes that stimulate viral replication and causes active infection.

Based on these earlier findings, the new study revealed that this balancing act is enabled by the CTCF protein when it binds to the viral DNA. Present during latent or dormant infections, CTCF is lost during active, symptomatic infections. The researchers created an altered version of the virus that lacked two of the CTCF binding sites. The absence of the binding sites made no difference in early-stage or acute infections. Similar results were found in infected cultured human nerve cells (trigeminal ganglia) and infected mice model. The researchers concluded that the mutant virus was found to have significantly weakened reactivation capacity.

Taken together, the experiments showed that deleting the CTCF binding sites weakened the virus’s ability to wake up from its dormant state thereby establishing the evidence that the CTCF protein is a key regulator of sleep-wake cycle in herpes simplex infections.

References:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29437926

https://hms.harvard.edu/news/viral-hideout?utm_source=Silverpop

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30110885

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30014861

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18264117