We have spent over a week discussing the effects of polymerase error rates on viruses. RNA viruses have the highest error rates in nature, a property that is believed to benefit the viral population. For example, selective pressure from the immune system or antiviral drugs may lead to changes that are beneficial for the population. In fact, it has been hypothesized that high error rates are required for survival of RNA viruses in complex environments. The isolation of a poliovirus mutant with an RNA polymerase that makes fewer errors during replication made it possible to test this hypothesis.
Infection of an animal host poses perhaps the greatest challenges to viral propagation. Transmission, entry, host defenses, tissue diversity and anatomical restrictions all are serious obstacles to the ability of a virus to replicate, disseminate, and successfully spread to other hosts. Therefore the effect of viral diversity is most stringently tested in infection of an animal.
In these experiments, mice were inoculated with the poliovirus mutant containing the G64S amino acid change in the viral RNA polymerase that causes enhanced fidelity. Infection of mice with poliovirus typically leads to symptoms of poliomyelitis that are similar to those in humans. Compared with the wild-type parental virus, the G64S mutant was less pathogenic: it caused significantly less paralysis and lethality. This effect could be a consequence of restricting the viral quasispecies, or a replication defect in mice caused by the G64S mutation. To distinguish between these possibilities, the G64S mutant was propagated in cells in the presence of a mutagen, a procedure which expanded the number of viral mutants. This treatment – basically expanding the quasispecies – lead to a significant increase in lethality of the G64S virus, to nearly the same extent as wild type virus.
Why would a less complex quasispecies lead to reduced pathogenicity? Viral growth and spread in an animal likely requires a diverse viral population, comprising many mutants, which can replicate efficiently in the many different cell types in an animal. Support for this idea comes from a competition experiment in which the poliovirus G64S mutant was mixed with wild type virus and inoculated into the leg muscle of a mouse. Several days later the mice were sacrificed and the virus that had reached the brain was characterized. The results showed that both wild type and the G64S virus could replicate in muscle, but the mutant virus spread to the brain less frequently.
These results show that mutations do benefit viral populations, especially in complex environments such as an animal. The ability to produce a quasispecies may allow virus populations to respond to the different environments encountered during spread between hosts, within organs and tissues, and in response to the pressure of the host immune response.
We’ll shortly return to influenza virus replication, but I hope you have been able to follow what to many must be a somewhat arcane discussion. From the silence I suspect that I might have lost some of you – it might help to go back over some of the posts. I’ll try to put up an index of some sort to make it easier to find articles. The blog format isn’t great when it comes to finding older material – once posts scroll off the bottom of the page, they don’t receive further notice.
Pfeiffer, J., & Kirkegaard, K. (2005). Increased fidelity reduces poliovirus fitness and virulence under selective pressure in mice PLoS Pathogens, 1 (2) DOI: 10.1371/journal.ppat.0010011
Vignuzzi, M., Stone, J., Arnold, J., Cameron, C., & Andino, R. (2005). Quasispecies diversity determines pathogenesis through cooperative interactions in a viral population Nature, 439 (7074), 344-348 DOI: 10.1038/nature04388
