Document Type

Article

Publication Date

8-3-2020

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.ppat.1008685

Abstract

Smallpox and monkeypox pose severe threats to human health. Other orthopoxviruses are comparably virulent in their natural hosts, including ectromelia, the cause of mousepox. Disease severity is linked to an array of immunomodulatory proteins including the B22 family, which has homologs in all pathogenic orthopoxviruses but not attenuated vaccine strains. We demonstrate that the ectromelia B22 member, C15, is necessary and sufficient for selective inhibition of CD4+ but not CD8+ T cell activation by immunogenic peptide and superantigen. Inhibition is achieved not by down-regulation of surface MHC- II or co-stimulatory protein surface expression but rather by interference with antigen presentation. The appreciable outcome is interference with CD4+ T cell synapse formation as determined by imaging studies and lipid raft disruption. Consequently, CD4+ T cell activating stimulus shifts to uninfected antigen-presenting cells that have received antigen from infected cells. This work provides insight into the immunomodulatory strategies of orthopoxviruses by elucidating a mechanism for specific targeting of CD4+ T cell activation, reflecting the importance of this cell type in control of the virus.

Language

English

Comments

This article is the authors' final published version in PLoS Pathogens, Volume 16, Issue 8, August 3, 2020, Article number e1008685.

The published version is available at https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.ppat.1008685. Copyright © Forsyth et al.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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