A Systematic Analysis of Host Factors Reveals a Med23-Interferon-? Regulatory Axis against Herpes Simplex Virus Type 1 Replication

Griffiths, Samantha J.; Koegl, Manfred; Boutell, Chris; Zenner, Helen L.; Crump, Colin M.; Pica, Francesca; Gonzalez, Orland; Friedel, Caroline C.; Barry, Gerald; Martin, Kim; Craigon, Marie H.; Chen, Rui; Kaza, Lakshmi N.; Fossum, Even; Fazakerley, John K.; Efstathiou, Stacey; Volpi, Antonio; Zimmer, Ralf; Ghazal, Peter; Haas, Jürgen

Whilst loss-of-function siRNA screens provide functional information on specific genes, protein interaction studies can provide insight into the mechanism of action by identifying physical interaction partners between pathogen and host. Genome-scale virus-host protein interaction screens using the yeast-two-hybrid system have been performed for HCV [21] , Influenza A virus [22] , Epstein Barr virus (EBV) [23] , Vaccinia virus [24, 25] , SARS coronavirus [26] and several non-human viruses [27] . Based on these genome-scale studies and individual interactions found by literature curation, several virus-host interaction databases have been created including the HIV-1, human protein interaction database at NCBI [28] , VirHostNet [29] , VirusMINT [30] , PIG [31] and HPIDB [32] . Although there is little overlap between individual cellular interactors of different viruses, targeting of a number of cellular processes such as cell cycle regulation, nuclear transport and immune response appears to be conserved [33] .