The endoplasmic reticulum provides the membrane platform for biogenesis of the flavivirus replication complex

Abstract

The cytoplasmic replication of positive-sense RNA viruses is associated with a dramatic rearrangement of host cellular membranes. These virus-induced changes result in the induction of vesicular structures that envelop the virus replication complex (RC). In this study, we have extended our previous observations on the intracellular location of West Nile virus strain Kunjin virus (WNVKUN) to show that the virus-induced recruitment of host proteins and membrane appears to occur at a pre-Golgi step. To visualize the WNVKUN replication complex, we performed three-dimensional (3D) modeling on tomograms from WNVKUN replicontransfected cells. These analyses have provided a 3D representation of the ..