CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

The arenavirus nucleoprotein (NP) is the main protein component of viral nucleocapsids and is strictly required for viral genome replication mediated by the L polymerase. Homo-oligomerization of NP is presumed to play an important role in nucleocapsid assembly, albeit the underlying mechanism and the relevance of NP-NP interaction in nucleocapsid activity are still poorly understood. Here, we evaluate the contribution of the New World Tacaribe virus (TCRV) NP self-interaction to nucleocapsid functional activity. We show that alanine substitution of N-terminal residues predicted to be available for NP-NP interaction strongly affected NP self-association, as determined by coimmunoprecipitation assays, produced a drastic inhibition of transcription and replication of a TCRV minigenome RNA, and impaired NP binding to RNA. Mutagenesis and functional analysis also revealed that, while dispensable for NP self-interaction, key amino acids at the C-terminal domain were essential for RNA synthesis. Furthermore, mutations at these C-terminal residues rendered NP unable to bind RNA both in vivo and in vitro but had no effect on the interaction with the L polymerase. In addition, while all oligomerization-defective variants tested exhibited unaltered capacities to sustain NP-L interaction, NP deletion mutants were fully incompetent to bind L, suggesting that, whereas NP self-association is dispensable, the integrity of both the N-terminal and C-terminal domains is required for binding the L polymerase. Overall, our results suggest that NP self-interaction mediated by the N-terminal domain may play a critical role in TCRV nucleocapsid assembly and activity and that the C-terminal domain of NP is implicated in RNA binding.