Monday, December 9, 2024
12/9/2024
Human Cytomegalovirus (HCMV) is a major cause of congenital birth defects and causes severe disease in a wide variety of immunosuppressed patient populations, including hematological cancer patients and transplant recipients. We have found that HCMV institutes a pro-viral metabolic program that drives numerous cellular metabolic activities to support the production of viral progeny. More recently, we find that the HCMV UL38 protein is necessary and sufficient to drive many aspects of HCMV-induced metabolic remodeling, and we hypothesize that UL38 supports infection through its inhibition of the TSC2 tumor suppressor protein to induce metabolic modulation. We will test this hypothesis in Aim 1 by elucidating how UL38-TSC2-mediated metabolic remodeling contributes to HCMV infection. In addition, we find that HCMV-induces the expression of neuronal enolase 2 (ENO2), which we find is important for robust HCMV infection. We hypothesize that ENO2 induction is critical for HCMV-mediated metabolic modulation, which we will test in Aim 2. Lastly, we find that both HCMV infection and UL38 expression sensitizes cells to metabolic perturbations, revealing vulnerabilities that could potentially be targeted therapeutically. We hypothesize that HCMV infection and UL38 expression induces a metabolically rigid state that sensitizes cells to metabolic challenges, a hypothesis we will test in Aim 3. The proposed work will broaden our understanding of an important host pathogen interaction, and given that these processes are essential for productive infection, the proposed experiments will highlight novel targets for therapeutic intervention.
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