Lipid raft and influenza virus--viral glycoproteins on a raft

Lipid molecules of the plasma membrane are not distributed homogeneously, but form a lateral organization resulting from preferential packaging of sphingolipid and cholesterol into lipid microdomain rafts, in which specific membrane proteins become incorporated. Evidence has accumulated that a variety of viruses including influenza virus use the raft during some steps of their replication cycles. Influenza virus glycoproteins, hemagglutinin (HA) and neuraminidase, associate intrinsically with the rafts. The HA protein is distributed in clusters at the plasma membrane and concentrated in the small area by interacting with the raft. A mutant influenza virus, whose HA protein lacks the ability to associate with the raft, contains reduced amounts of the HA proteins and exhibits a decreased virus to cell fusion activity, resulting in greatly reduced infectivity. Thus, the raft may play an important role in virus production by acting as a concentrating devise or an efficient carrier to transport the HA protein to the site of virus budding.