Elsevier

Virology

Volume 531, May 2019, Pages 1-18
Virology

Mosquito cells persistently infected with dengue virus produce viral particles with host-dependent replication

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.virol.2019.02.018Get rights and content
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Abstract

Dengue viruses (DENV) are important arboviruses that can establish a persistent infection in its mosquito vector Aedes. Mosquitoes have a short lifetime in nature which makes trying to study the processes that take place during persistent viral infections in vivo. Therefore, C6/36 cells have been used to study this type of infection. C6/36 cells persistently infected with DENV 2 produce virions that cannot infect BHK -21 cells. We hypothesized that the following passages in mosquito cells have a deleterious impact on DENV fitness in vertebrate cells. Here, we demonstrated that the viral particles released from persistently infected cells were infectious to mosquito but not to vertebrate cells. This host restriction occurs at the replication level and is associated with several mutations in the DENV genome. In summary, our findings provide new information about viral replication fitness in a host-dependent manner.

Keywords

Dengue viruses
Mosquito cells
Persistent viral infection
Viral fitness
Host adaptation

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