Dissecting Herpes Simplex Virus 1-Induced Host Shutoff at the RNA Level

Abstract

The HSV-1 virion host shutoff ( vhs ) protein efficiently cleaves both host and viral mRNAs in a translation-dependent manner. In this study, we model and quantify changes in vhs activity, as well as virus-induced global loss of host transcriptional activity, during productive HSV-1 infection. In general, HSV-1-induced alterations in total RNA levels were dominated by these two global effects. In contrast, chromatin-associated RNA depicted gene-specific transcriptional changes. This revealed highly concordant transcriptional changes in WT and Δvhs infections, confirmed DUX4 as a key transcriptional regulator in HSV-1 infection, and identified vhs -dependent transcriptional downregulation of the integrin adhesome and extracellular matrix components. The latter explained seemingly gene-specific effects previously attributed to vhs -mediated mRNA degradation and resulted in a concordant loss in protein levels by 8 h p.i. for many of the respective genes.