Structural Basis for Penetration of the Glycan Shield of Hepatitis C Virus E2 Glycoprotein by a Broadly Neutralizing Human Antibody

Hepatitis C virus (HCV) is a major cause of liver cirrhosis and hepatocellular carcinoma. A challenge for HCV vaccine development is to identify conserved epitopes able to elicit protective antibodies against this highly diverse virus. Glycan shielding is a mechanism by which HCV masks such epitopes on its E2 envelope glycoprotein. Antibodies to the E2 region comprising residues 412–423 (E2_412–423) have broadly neutralizing activities. However, an adaptive mutation in this linear epitope, N417S, is associated with a glycosylation shift from Asn-417 to Asn-415 that enables HCV to escape neutralization by mAbs such as HCV1 and AP33. By contrast, the human mAb HC33.1 can neutralize virus bearing the N417S mutation. To understand how HC33.1 penetrates the glycan shield created by the glycosylation shift to Asn-415, we determined the structure of this broadly neutralizing mAb in complex with its E2_412–423 epitope to 2.0 Å resolution. The conformation of E2_412–423 bound to HC33.1 is distinct from the β-hairpin conformation of this peptide bound to HCV1 or AP33, because of disruption of the β-hairpin through interactions with the unusually long complementarity-determining region 3 of the HC33.1 heavy chain. Whereas Asn-415 is buried by HCV1 and AP33, it is solvent-exposed in the HC33.1-E2_412–423 complex, such that glycosylation of Asn-415 would not prevent antibody binding. Furthermore, our results highlight the structural flexibility of the E2_412–423 epitope, which may serve as an immune evasion strategy to impede induction of antibodies targeting this site by reducing its antigenicity.     

Cell cycle-related transformation of the E2F4-p130 repressor complex

During G0 phase the p130, member of the pRb tumor suppressor protein family, forms a repressor complex with E2F4 which is inactivated in G1/S by hyperphosphorylation of the p130. The role of p130 after G1/S remains poorly investigated. We found that in nuclear extracts of T98G cells, the p130-E2F4-DNA (pp-E2F4) complex does not dissociate at G1/S transition, but instead reverts to the p130-E2F4-cyclin E/A-cdk2 (cyc/cdk-pp-E2F4) complex, which is detected in S and G2/M phases of the cell cycle. Hyperphosphorylation of the p130 at G1/S transition is associated with a decrease of its total amount; however, this protein is still detected during the rest of the cell cycle, and it is increasingly hyperphosphorylated in the cytosol, but continuously dephosphorylated in the nucleus. Both nuclear and cytosol cell fractions in T98G cells contain a hyperphosphorylated form of p130 in complex with E2F4 at S and G2/M cell cycle phases. In contrast to T98G cells, transformation of the p130 containing cyc/cdk-pp-E2F4 complex into the p130-pp-E2F4 repressor does not occur in HeLa cells under growth restriction conditions.