Bats Possess Unique Variants of the Antiviral Restriction Factor Tetherin

Joshua A. Hayward; Mary Tachedjian; Adam Johnson; Tamsin B. Gordon; Jie Cui; Glenn A. Marsh; Michelle L. Baker; Lin-Fa Wang; Gilda Tachedjian

Previous reports on the necessity of the tetherin GPI anchor for inhibition of viral particle release (22, 36) indicates that the lack of a GPI anchor on isoform C would likely result in an inability to restrict viral egress from the host cell. However, sheep tetherin B, which does not possess a GPI-signal peptide ( Figure 2B ) is capable of limited restriction of betaretroviral VLPs through an unknown mechanism (43) . This may indicate that isoform C either has an antiviral range that does not include HIVΔVpu VLPs, or that it does not have any antiviral function at all. The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not peer-reviewed) is the . https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.04.08.031203 doi: bioRxiv preprint resulted in the expansion and diversification of tetherin genes in vesper bats of the genus Myotis, and the emergence of unique splice variants of tetherin in the fruit bat P. alecto, supporting the hypothesis of differential antiviral gene evolution in bats.