Helena Zábranská with colleagues from IOCB Prague groups led by Iva Pichová and Jan Weber presented new insights into the processing of hepatitis B virus e antigen precursor (p25) to mature e-antigen. HBeAg, which serves as a marker of an actively replicating HBV virus infection, modulates the host immune response and contributes to establishment of persistent HBV infection.
The mechanism by which the individual HBe processing forms are distributed to different cellular compartments remains unclear. Here, researchers revealed an auto-regulatory function of conserved cysteine residues from the p25 signal sequence, preventing mislocalization of the precore protein, and reported that translocation of p25 to the endoplasmic reticulum is promoted by cellular translocon-associated protein complex (TRAP).
Read the paper:
- Zábranská, H., Zábranský, A., Lubyová, B., Hodek, J., Křenková, A., Hubálek, M., Weber, J. and Pichová, I. (2022), Biogenesis of hepatitis B virus e antigen is driven by translocon-associated protein complex and regulated by conserved cysteine residues within its signal peptide sequence. FEBS J. https://doi.org/10.1111/febs.16304
