The Glycoproteins of All Filovirus Species Use the Same Host Factors for Entry into Bat and Human Cells but Entry Efficiency Is Species Dependent

Hoffmann, Markus; González Hernández, Mariana; Berger, Elisabeth; Marzi, Andrea; Pöhlmann, Stefan

We next addressed whether the furin cleavage site and MLD, which are dispensable for entry into humans cells [23, 24, [57] [58] [59] [60] , might be required for entry into bat cells. For this, we employed two EBOV-GP mutants: EBOV-GP(ΔCleav), in which the furin cleavage motif was mutated ( 497 RRTRR 501 > 497 AGTAA 501 ) and cleavage was abolished [24] , and EBOV-GP (ΔMLD), which lacks almost the entire MLD (aa residues 309-486, Fig 1B) . The GP mutants facilitated entry into human, primate and fruit bat cell lines with comparable efficiency as GP wt (Fig 3) . Moreover, transduction of HEK-293T and one of the four fruit bat cell lines by particles bearing the MLD-deletion mutant was slightly higher than that measured for GP wt.