Genetic studies on the poliovirus 2C protein, an NTPase. A plausible mechanism of guanidine effect on the 2C function and evidence for the importance of 2C oligomerization.

Poliovirus RNA replication is known to be inhibited by millimolar concentrations of guanidine. A variety of guanidine-resistant (gr) and guanidine-dependent (gd) poliovirus strains were selected, and mutations responsible for the phenotypic alterations were mapped to distinct loci of the viral NTP-binding pattern containing protein 2C. Together with already published results, our data have demonstrated that the overwhelming majority of guanidine mutants of poliovirus 2C can be assigned to one of the two classes, N (with a change in Asn179) or M (with a change in Met187). As inferred from the structure/function relations in other NTP-binding proteins, both these "main" mutations should reside in a loop adjoining the so-called B motif known to interact with the Mg2+ involved in the NTP splitting. In classes M (always) and N (not infrequently), these B motif mutations were combined with mutations in, or close to, motif A (involved in binding of the NTP phosphate moieties) and/or motif C (another conserved element of a subset of NTP-binding proteins). These data strongly support the notion that the region of polypeptide 2C involved in the NTP utilization is affected by the guanidine mutations and by the presence of the drug itself. The mutations, however, never altered highly conserved amino acid residues assumed to be essential for the NTP binding or splitting. These facts and some other considerations led us to propose that guanidine affects coupling between the NTP binding and/or splitting, on the one hand, and the 2C function (related to conformational changes), on the other. Both N and M classes of mutants contain gr and gd variants, and the gr/gd interconversion as well as modulations of the guanidine phenotype can be caused by additional mutations within each class; sometimes, these additional substitutions are located far away from the "main" mutations. It is suggested that the target for guanidine action involves long-range tertiary interactions. Under conditions restrictive for the individual growth of each parent, efficient reciprocal intra-allelic complementation between guanidine-sensitive (gs) and gd strains (of M or N classes) was observed. The complementation occurred at the level of viral RNA synthesis. These data allowed us to propose that oligomerization of polypeptide 2C is an essential step in the replication of viral genome.