Sumoylation at the Host-Pathogen Interface

Wilson, Van G.

Functionally, sumoylation is now implicated in a diverse array of critical cellular processes including nuclear processes such as RNA processing, chromatin remodeling, genome maintenance, transcriptional regulation, mitosis, meiosis, differentiation and development, apoptosis, and nucleocytoplasmic transport [40] . More recently, significant non-nuclear functions of sumoylation have been identified in regulation of ion channel activity [41, 42] and metabolic pathways [43, 44] . Because of this pleiotropic ability to modify numerous proteins and affect a wide range of cellular processes, sumoylation is an attractive target for pathogens to use in modulating the cellular environment to favor pathogen replication and/or maintenance. There are numerous examples of viral proteins that are sumoylated (Table 1) , so utilization of this host system by viruses to regulate viral protein function is well documented and will not be further explored in this review (for recent review see [45] ). In contrast, recent examples have been described where pathogens alter host sumoylation, either globally or for host specific targets, and the following sections will examine mechanisms by which both viral and bacterial pathogens perturb the host sumoylation process.