Download Detailed characterization of the interactions between hepatitis C virus and host proteins.

NUS Graduate School for Integrative Sciences and Engineering
Research Project Write-up
Title of Project: Detailed characterization of the interactions between hepatitis C virus and host
proteins
Name of Supervisor: Yee-Joo TAN
Contact Details: [email protected]
Short Description
Hepatitis C virus (HCV), a positive-stranded RNA virus of the family Flaviviridae, is one
of the major causes of liver diseases like cirrhosis, steatosis, and hepatocellular carcinoma. It
currently infects an estimated 3% of people worldwide and poses an important medical problem
in both developed and developing countries. After infecting its host, HCV makes use of cellular
machineries to replicate, assemble and bud. In addition, HCV impedes the function of host’s
antiviral machineries in order to establish persistent infection.
Importantly, the interaction
between HCV and host will determine the outcome of the viral infection. To characterize these
processes in details, several novel viral-host interactions have been identified through yeast-twohybrid screen, proteomic and bioinformatic approaches.
For the first part of the project, we aim to determine the mechanism of binding for each
pair of viral-host proteins. By using deletion and substitution mutants of the proteins and
performing binding assays, the binding domains in either the viral or host proteins will be
identified. In addition, we will determine if each host protein interacts with a specific HCV
protein or form complexes with several HCV proteins.
An infectious clone of HCV has recently been developed to produce HCV robustly in cell
culture (commonly known as the HCVcc system). This is based on the JFH-1 strain, which is a
genotype 2a strain from a Japanese patient with fulminant hepatitis, and allows the entire virus
life cycle including entry, replication, assembly and release, to be studied in hepatoma cell lines
like Huh7.5. For the second part of the project, we aim to use the JFH-1 based HCVcc system to
determine the impact of these viral-host interactions at different stages of the HCV life-cycle.