Tropical Journal of Pharmaceutical Research

Original Research Article | OPEN ACCESS

siRNAs targeting viral protein 5: The major capsid protein of herpes simplex virus-1 affects its propagation and cytoskeleton

Kaiqi Ma, Fujun Jin, Qiaoli Wang, Zhe Ren, Kai Zheng, Yifei Wang

Biomedicine Research and Development Center, Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Bioengineering Medicine, National Engineering Research Center of Genetic Medicine, Jinan University, Guangzhou 510632, China;

For correspondence:- Yifei Wang Email: twang-yf@163.com Tel:+862085223426

Received: 5 July 2014 Accepted: 20 February 2015 Published: 31 March 2015

Citation: Ma K, Jin F, Wang Q, Ren Z, Zheng K, Wang Y. siRNAs targeting viral protein 5: The major capsid protein of herpes simplex virus-1 affects its propagation and cytoskeleton. Trop J Pharm Res 2015; 14(3):391-397 doi: 10.4314/tjpr.v14i3.6

© 2015 The authors.
This is an Open Access article that uses a funding model which does not charge readers or their institutions for access and distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0) and the Budapest Open Access Initiative (http://www.budapestopenaccessinitiative.org/read), which permit unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited..

Abstract

Purpose: To investigate whether siRNA targeting viral protein 5 (VP5) can become a new treatment for herpes simplex virus type 1 (HSV-1).

Methods: Flow cytometry was performed to determine the ratio of siRNA and lipo2000 to reach the highest transfection efficiency. Western blot and q-PCR were performed to determine the knockdown efficiency of siRNA targeting UL19, as well as changes in cytoskeleton proteins. Plaque reduction assays and confocal microscopy were conducted to test the influence of VP5 knockdown on the HSV-1 life cycle and viral replication. F-actin organization was observed through confocal microscopy during HSV-1 infection when transfected with siRNA.

Results: Relative expression level of the UL19 gene dropped to 6 % while plaque formation inhibition rate rose to 85 % compared with virus control. Knocking down VP5 expression abrogated the changes to F-actin that were induced by HSV-1 infection.

Conclusion: Interfering with UL19 gene expression inhibits HSV-1 replication efficiently in vitro. The results indicate that the major capsid protein VP5 encoding gene UL19 may be a promising target for RNA interference-based therapeutic strategy against HSV-1.

Keywords: siRNA, Viral protein 5, Herpes simplex virus type 1, Gene expression, Propagation, Cytoskeleton rearrangement, F-actin, Transfection