Construction of a herpes simplex virus type 1 mutant with only a three-nucleotide change in the branchpoint region of the latency-associated transcript (LAT) and the stability of its two-kilobase LAT intron.

Previous studies using a eukaryotic expression system indicated that the unusual stability of the latency-associated transcript (LAT) intron was due to its nonconsensus branchpoint sequence (T.-T Wu, Y.-H. Su, T. M. Block, and J. M. Taylor, Virology, 243:140-149, 1998). The present study investigated the role of the branchpoint sequence in the stability of the intron expressed from the herpes simplex virus type 1 (HSV-1) genome and the role of LAT intron stability in the HSV-1 life cycle. A branchpoint mutant called Sy2 and the corresponding rescued viruses, SyRA and SyRB, were constructed. To preserve the coding sequence of the immediate early gene icp0, which overlaps with the branchpoint region of the 2-kb LAT, a 3-nucleotide mutation into the branchpoint region of the 2-kb LAT was introduced, resulting in a branchpoint that is 85% identical to the consensus intron branchpoint sequence of eukaryotic cells. As anticipated, there was a 90- to 96-fold reduction in 2-kb LAT accumulation following productive infection in tissue culture and latent infection in mice with Sy2, as determined by Northern blot analysis. These results clearly suggest that the accumulation of the 2-kb intron in tissue culture and in vivo is, at least in part, due to the nonconsensus branchpoint sequence of the LAT intron. Interestingly, a failure to accumulate LAT was associated with greater progeny production of Sy2 at a low multiplicity of infection (0.01) in tissue culture, but not in mice. However, the ability of mutant Sy2 to reactivate from trigeminal ganglia (TG) derived from latently infected mice was indistinguishable from that of wild-type virus, as assayed in the mouse TG explant reactivation system.