Structure of the C-terminal head domain of the fowl adenovirus type 1 short fibre.

There are more than 100 known adenovirus serotypes, including 50 human serotypes. They can infect all 5 major vertebrate classes but only Aviadenovirus infecting birds and Mastadenovirus infecting mammals have been well studied. CELO (chicken embryo lethal orphan) adenovirus is responsible for mild respiratory pathologies in birds. Most studies on CELO virus have focussed on its genome sequence and organisation whereas the structural work on CELO proteins has only recently started. Contrary to most adenoviruses, the vertices of CELO virus reveal pentons with two fibres of different lengths. The distal parts (or head) of those fibres are involved in cellular receptor binding. Here we have determined the atomic structure of the short-fibre head of CELO (amino acids 201-410) at 2.0 A resolution. Despite low sequence identity, this structure is conserved compared to the other adenovirus fibre heads. We have used the existing CELO long-fibre head structure and the one we show here for a structure-based alignment of 11 known adenovirus fibre heads which was subsequently used for the construction of an evolutionary tree. Both the fibre head sequence and structural alignments suggest that enteric human group F adenovirus 41 (short fibre) is closer to the CELO fibre heads than the canine CAdV-2 fibre head, that lies closer to the human virus fibre heads.