Dynamics of LD in JUNV infected cells: just a product of lipophagy?

CECILIA A VÁZQUEZ; CYBELE C. GARCÍA; SANDRA CORDO

Virtual

Congreso; Viruses 2022 - At the Leading Edge of Virology Research; 2022

Junín virus (JUNV) is one of the members of the Arenaviridae family that causes a hemorrhagicfever, the Argentine hemorrhagic fever. In previous studies, we have described that JUNV'sreplication cycle is closely linked to the lipid metabolism of the cells it infects.Lipid droplets (LD) are a central hub for lipid storage, handling and trafficking that have beeninvolved both in the replication cycles of viruses from diverse families and in the cell's immuneresponse. As such, we set to study the biology of lipid droplets in the context of JUNV infection.We have previously shown that the pharmacological modulation of LD availability leads to changesin viral yield, demonstrating that these organelles are important for the proper replication ofJUNV. Conversely, we found that cells infected with JUNV contain lower amounts of LD than non-infected cells. LD can be subjected to both lipolysis and lipophagy, mechanisms we studied inorder to determine if they were responsible for the observed phenotype. Lipophagy is a specifictype of autophagy, which is known to be induced by JUNV. Through confocal microscopy we havefound colocalization events between LD and lysosomes. This suggests that the infection with JUNVcould be triggering LD degradation through lipophagy, but this might not be the only interveningfactor.We are currently also analyzing the expression of genes involved both in the synthesis anddegradation of lipids at different time-points post infection. Preliminary results suggest that the LDdynamic is complex, with the expression of some genes being upregulated in a transitory mannerat short and long times post infection.