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The Recursive-Least-Square (RLS) adaptive filter 28 currently runs every four hours, and alerts are sent to public health officials in Utah and Pennsylvania. RLS, a dynamic autoregressive linear model, computes an expected count for each syndrome category for seven counties in Utah and 16 counties in Pennsylvania as well as for the combined counts for each state. We use RLS because it has a minimal reliance on historical data for setting model parameters and a high sensitivity to rapid increases in a time series e.g., a sudden increase in daily counts. RLS triggers an alert when the current actual count exceeds the 95% confidence interval for the predicted count.

During the 2002 Olympics we also used the What's Strange About Recent Events (WSARE 1.0) algorithm. 29 WSARE performs a heuristic search over combinations of temporal and spatial features to detect anomalous densities of cases in space and time. Such features include all aspects of recent patient records, including syndromal categories, age, gender, and geographical information about patients. The criteria used in the past for sending a WSARE 1.0 alert was that there has been an increase in the number of patients with specific characteristics relative to the counts on the same day of the week during recent weeks and the p-value after careful adjustment for multiple testing for the increase was #0.05. Version 3.0 of WSARE, which will incorporate a Bayesian model for computing expected counts rather than using unadjusted historical counts currently, is under development.

When an algorithm triggers an alert based on the above criteria, RODS sends e-mail and/or page alerts to its users. RODS uses an XML-based configuration file to define users' e-mail and pager addresses. The e-mail version of the alert includes a URL link to a graph of the time series that triggered the alarm with two comparison time series: total visits for the same time period and normalized counts.

RODS has a password-protected, encrypted Web site at which users can review health care registration and sales of OTC health care products on epidemic plots and maps. When a user logs in, RODS will check the user's profile and will display data only for his or her health department's jurisdiction. The interface comprises three screens-Main, Epiplot, and Mapplot.

The main screen alternates views automatically among each of the available data sources (currently health care registrations and OTC products in Pennsylvania and Utah and OTC sales only for other states). The view alternates every two minutes as shown in Figure 3 . The clinic visits view shows daily total visits and seven daily syndromes for the past week. The OTC data view shows daily sales for five product categories and the total, also for the past week. Users also can set the view to a specific county in a state. If the normalize control box is checked, the counts in the time series being displayed will be divided by (normalized by) the total daily sales of OTC health care products or ED visits for the region.

The Epiplot screen provides a general epidemic plotting capability. The user can simultaneously view a mixture of different syndromes and OTC product categories for any geographic region (state, county, or zip code), and for any time interval. The user also can retrieve case details as shown in Figure 4 . The Get Cases button queries the database for the admission date, age, zip code, and chief complaint (verbatim, not classified into syndrome category) of all patients in the time interval and typically is used to examine an anomalous density (spike) of cases. The Download Data button will download data as a compressed comma separated file for further analyses.

The Mapplot screen is an interface to ArcIMS, an Internetenabled GIS product developed by Environmental Systems Research Institute, Inc. Mapplot colors zip code regions to indicate the proportion of patients presenting with a particular syndrome. The GIS server also can overlay state boundaries, county boundaries, water bodies, hospital locations, landmarks, streets, and highways on the public health data as shown in Figure 5 . Similar to Epiplot, Mapplot also can display case details for a user-selected zip code.

RODS has been in operation for four years and, like most production systems, has acquired many fault-tolerant features. For example, at the software level, HL7 listeners continue to receive messages and temporarily store the messages when the database is off-line. A data manager program runs every ten minutes and, on finding such a cache, it loads the unstored messages to the database when the database is back on-line. In addition, the data manager program monitors and restarts HL7 listeners as necessary.

The database uses ''archive log'' mode to log every transaction to ensure that the database can recover from a system failure.

The hardware architecture also is fault tolerant. All servers have dual power supplies and dual network cards. All hard drives use Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disk configurations. In addition to dual power supplies, all machines are connected to an uninterrupted power supply that is capable of sending an e-mail alert to the RODS administrator when the main power is down.

An important component of RODS that currently is used only at the UPMC Health System in Pittsburgh is the Health System Resident Component (HSRC). The HSRC is located within the firewall of a health system and connects directly to the HL7 message router. The HSRC currently receives a diverse set of clinical data from the HL7 message router including culture results, radiology reports, and dictated F i g u r e 3. Health care registrations view in the Main screen of RODS. The Main screen alternates views every 2 minutes among data types available in the public health jurisdiction. The figure shows eight plots of health care registration data-total visits, botulinic, constitutional, gastrointestinal (GI), hemorrhagic, neurological, rash, and respiratory. After 2 minutes, over-the-counter data will be displayed. The Main screen can be used as a ''situation room'' display. emergency room notes. Its purpose is to provide additional public health surveillance functions that would not be possible if it were located outside of the firewall due to restrictions on the release of identifiable clinical data. The HSRC uses patient identifiers to link laboratory and radiology information to perform case detection. In the past, we have used HSRC to monitor for patients with both a gram-positive rod in a preliminary microbiology culture report and ''mediastinal widening'' in a radiology report. The HSRC is a case detector in a distributed outbreak detection system that is capable of achieving much higher specificity of patient diagnostic categorization through access to more information.

HSRC also removes identifiable information before transmitting data to the RODS system, a function provided by the health system's message router in other hospitals that connect to RODS.

The HSRC at UPMC Health System functions as an electronic laboratory reporting system, although the state and local health departments are not yet ready to receive real-time messaging from the system. Currently, it sends email alerts to the director of the laboratory and hospital infection control group about positive cultures for organisms that are required to be reported to public health in the state of Pennsylvania. 30 It also sends messages to hospital infection control when it detects organisms that cause nosocomial infections. These organisms include Clostridium difficile, methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, and vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus.

We have been able in HSRC to prototype one additional feature, which is a ''look-back'' function that facilitates very rapid outbreak investigations by providing access to electronic medical records to public health investigators as shown in Figure 6 . This feature requires a token that can be passed to a hospital information system that can uniquely identify a patient, and the reason we have prototyped this feature in the HSRC and not in RODS is simply that HSRC runs within the firewall so an unencrypted token can be used. The lookback is accomplished as follows: when a public health user identifies an anonymous patient record of interest (e.g., one of 20 patients with diarrhea today from one zip code), HSRC calls the UPMC Health System Web-based electronic medical record system and passes it the patient identifier. UPMC Health System then requests the user to log in using the UPMC-issued password before providing access to the record directly from its own secure Web site. This approach is not intended to be implemented in HSRC, but rather in the RODS system outside of the firewall of a health system. It is intended to use encrypted identifiers that the health system would decrypt to retrieve the correct record. The HSRC could provide the encryption-decryption service or it could be provided by another data system in the hospital. We estimate that the prevalence of health systems that have Web-based results review in the United States is 30% to 50% and growing so that this approach could very quickly improve the efficiency of outbreak investigations. For these reasons, we have moved to an application service provider model for dissemination in which we encourage state and local health departments to form coalitions to support shared services. We also have been fortunate to have sufficient grant funding from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania to be able to support these services on an interim basis while sustainable funding models evolve.

Our original design objectives for RODS were real-time collection of data with sufficient geographic coverage and sampling density to provide early syndromic warning of a large-scale aerosol release of anthrax. Although we have not achieved all of our initial design objectives, progress has been substantial. The research identified two types of data-freetext chief complaints and sales of OTC health care prod- ucts-that can be obtained in real time or near real time at sampling levels of 70% or higher for most of the United States. These results were obtained through large-scale deployments of RODS in Pennsylvania and Utah and through building the National Retail Data Monitor described in the accompanying article in this issue of JAMIA. The deployments also provided insights about organizational and technical success factors that would inform an effort to scale the project nationally.

The project established the importance of HL7 message routers (also known as integration engines) for public health surveillance. HL7 message routers are a mature, highly prevalent technology in health care. We demonstrated that free-text triage chief complaints can be obtained in real time from most U.S. hospitals through message routers and that these data represent early syndromal information about disease. Many other clinical data of value to public health are transmitted using the HL7 standard (e.g., orders for diagnostic tests, especially microbiology tests, reports of chest radiographs, medications, and test results) and can be integrated into RODS or other surveillance systems capable of receiving HL7 messages.

As a result of our efforts to disseminate this technology by giving it away, we have learned that most health departments do not have the technical resources to build and maintain real-time electronic disease surveillance systems. Our application service provider model has been much more success-ful, and we now recommend that states form coalitions to share the costs of such services.

The project very early identified the need for a computing component to reside within the firewall of a health system, connected to the hospital's HL7 message router. This component would function as a case detector in a distributed public health surveillance scheme linking laboratory and radiology data to increase the specificity of case detection. It has proven very difficult to disseminate this technology, perhaps due to the complexity of the idea. Nevertheless, the threat of bioterrorism has created a need for such technology, and this approach, or something with equivalent function, must be deployed.

Adherence to NEDSS architectural standards was an early design objective that we have met. RODS 1.5 closely follows NEDSS architectural, software, messaging, and data specifications. Our success is a strong validation of those standards. We will gain further understanding of the standards as we attempt to use RODS components including HL7 listeners, natural language parsers, message parsers, databases, user interfaces, notification subsystems, and detection algorithms with other NEDSS compliant systems. An ongoing project will use RODS to collect chief complaints and integrate them into the Utah Department of Health's planned NEDSS system.

We have demonstrated the ability to rapidly deploy RODS in a special event with the added advantage that the system F i g u r e 6. Look-back function of RODS. The user has selected one patient to investigate using the screen that is in the background and partly hidden by overlap. RODS has logged the user into the results-review function of an electronic medical record and requested that patient's chart, which is shown on the screen in the foreground.

persisted after the event. This experience suggests strongly that RODS or similar systems be considered an alternative to drop-in surveillance.

Our future plans are to meet our initial design objective to develop early-warning capability for a large, outdoor release of anthrax, especially ensuring that the data and analysis produced by RODS are reviewed by public health. This goal will require improvements in the interfaces and the detection algorithms to reduce false alarms and to vastly improve the efficiency with which anomalies are evaluated by use of multiple types of data, better interfaces, and implementation of the look-back function. We would like to enlarge as quickly as possible the application service provider to include more states and more types of clinical data so that states will be in a position to prospectively evaluate the detection performance from different types of data on naturally occurring outbreaks.

Our long-term goals are to add additional disease scenarios to the design objectives such as detection of in-building anthrax release, vector-borne disease, food-borne disease, and a communicable disease such as severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS).

RODS is a NEDSS-compliant public health surveillance system that focuses on real-time collection and analysis of data routinely collected for other purposes. RODS is deployed in two states and was installed quickly in seven weeks for the 2002 Olympics. Our experience demonstrates the feasibility of such a surveillance system and the challenges involved.

Outbreaks, emerging infections, and bioterrorism have become serious threats. It is our hope that the front-line of public health workers, astute citizens, and health care workers will detect outbreaks early enough so that systems such as RODS are not needed. However, timely outbreak detection is too important to be left to human detection alone. The notion that public health can operate optimally without timely electronic information is as unwise as having commercial airline pilots taking off without weather forecasts and radar. Conservation of polyamine regulation by translational frameshifting from yeast to mammals Regulation of ornithine decarboxylase in vertebrates involves a negative feedback mechanism requiring the protein antizyme. Here we show that a similar mechanism exists in the fission yeast Schizosaccharomyces pombe. The expression of mammalian antizyme genes requires a specific +1 translational frameshift. The efficiency of the frameshift event reflects cellular polyamine levels creating the autoregulatory feedback loop. As shown here, the yeast antizyme gene and several newly identified antizyme genes from different nematodes also require a ribosomal frameshift event for their expression. Twelve nucleotides around the frameshift site are identical between S.pombe and the mammalian counterparts. The core element for this frameshifting is likely to have been present in the last common ancestor of yeast, nematodes and mammals. The ef®ciency of +1 ribosomal frameshifting at a speci®c codon is used as a sensor to regulate polyamine levels in mammalian cells. The frameshifting occurs in decoding the gene antizyme 1, which has two partially overlapping open reading frames (ORFs). Protein sequencing showed that the reading-frame shift occurs at the last codon of ORF1, causing a proportion of ribosomes to enter ORF2 to synthesize a transframe protein (Matsufuji et al., 1995) . ORF2 encodes the main functional domains (Matsufuji et al., 1990; Miyazaki et al., 1992) of antizyme but has no ribosome initiation site of its own. The antizyme 1 protein binds to ornithine decarboxylase (ODC) (Murakami et al., 1992a; Cof®no, 1993, 1994) , inhibits it (Heller et al., 1976) and targets it for degradation by the 26S proteosome without ubiquitylation (Murakami et al., 1992b (Murakami et al., , 1999 . ODC catalyzes the ®rst and usually ratelimiting step in the synthesis of polyamines, conversion of ornithine to putrescine. Putrescine is a substrate for the synthesis of spermidine and spermine. Because of its inhibition of ODC, antizyme 1 is a negative regulator of the synthesis of polyamines. In addition, antizyme 1 is a negative regulator of the polyamine transporter (Mitchell et al., 1994; Suzuki et al., 1994; Sakata et al., 1997) . As discovered by Matsufuji and colleagues (Gesteland et al., 1992) and Rom and Kahana (1994) , increasing polyamine levels elevate frameshifting in decoding antizyme 1 mRNA and so increase the level of antizyme 1. Since antizyme 1 negatively regulates the synthesis and uptake of polyamines, the frameshifting is the sensor for an autoregulatory circuit. A second mammalian paralog of antizyme, antizyme 2, has very similar properties to antizyme 1, including the regulatory frameshifting, but does not stimulate degradation of ODC under certain conditions where antizyme 1 is active (Ivanov et al., 1998a; Zhu et al., 1999; Y.Murakami, S.Matsufuji, I.P.Ivanov, R.F.Gesteland and J.F.Atkins, in preparation) . Just like antizyme 1, antizyme 2 mRNA is ubiquitously expressed in the body but is 16 times less abundant than mRNA of antizyme 1 (Ivanov et al., 1998a) . In addition to antizyme 1 and 2, mammals have a third paralog of the gene, antizyme 3 (also encoded by two ORFs), which is expressed only during spermatogenesis (Ivanov et al., 2000) . Zebra®sh also have multiple antizyme genes, which differ in their expression patterns and activities (Saito et al., 2000) .

Numerous studies have addressed the regulation of fungal ODC in response to exogenously added polyamines. In the cases examined, Physarum polycephalum (Mitchell and Wilson, 1983) , Saccharomyces cerevisiae (Fonzi, 1989; Toth and Cof®no, 1999) and Neurospora crassa (Barnett et al., 1988; Williams et al., 1992) , added polyamines, especially spermidine, result in signi®cant repression of ODC activity. The mechanisms of repression seem to vary from fungus to fungus and are apparently different from the mechanism of polyamine-dependent regulation of ODC in higher eukaryotes. In some cases, the existence of an antizyme-like protein has been suggested but has either been disproved, as in the case of N.crassa (Barnett et al., 1988) , or has never been substantiated, as is the case with S.cerevisiae.

As expected from their small cationic nature and ability to neutralize negative charges locally, polyamines play key roles in processes ranging from the functioning of certain ion channels (Williams, 1997) , nucleic acid packaging, DNA replication, apoptosis, transcription and translation. The role of polyamines can be complex as illustrated by the transfer of the butylamine moiety of spermidine to a lysine residue to form hypusine in mammalian translation initiation factor eIF-5A, the only known substrate for this reaction (Tome et al., 1997; Lee et al., 1999) . Spermine negatively regulates the growth of prostatic carcinoma cells at their primary site (Smith et al., 1995) , but at later stages of tumor progression it fails to induce antizyme, which correlates with cells becoming refractory to spermine (Koike et al., 1999) . Lack of antizyme function is also important in the early deregulation of cellular proliferation in oral tumors (Tsuji Conservation of polyamine regulation by translational frameshifting from yeast to mammals The EMBO Journal Vol. 19 No. 8 pp. 1907±1917, 2000 ã European Molecular Biology Organization et al., 1998) and probably others. The levels of polyamines are altered in many tumors, and inhibitors of polyamine synthesis are being tested for antiproliferative and cell death effects. The synthesis of ODC varies during the cell cycle in normal cells (Linden et al., 1985; Fredlund et al., 1995) . It is induced by many growth stimuli and is constitutively elevated in transformed cells (Pegg, 1988; Auvinen et al., 1992) with some phosphorylated ODC being translocated to the surface membrane where it is important for mitotic cytoskeleton rearrangement events (Heiskala et al., 1999) .

Antizyme is one example of certain mRNA-contained signals that can elevate speci®c frameshifting >1000-fold above the background level of normal translational errors. In addition to antizyme, frameshifting is also involved in the decoding of some bacterial and yeast genes and especially in many mammalian Retroviruses and Coronaviruses, plant viruses and bacterial insertion sequences (Atkins et al., 1999) . The site of frameshifting in both mammalian antizyme 1 and 2 mRNAs is UCC UGA, where quadruplet translocation occurs at UCCU (underlined) to shift reading to the +1 frame, immediately before the UGA stop codon of the initiating frame (Matsufuji et al., 1995; Ivanov et al., 1998a) . For the frameshifting to occur with an ef®ciency of 20% or more, it is important that the 3¢ base of the quadruplet is the ®rst base of a stop codon. Other important features are a pseudoknot just 3¢ of the shift site and a speci®c sequence 5¢ of the shift site (Matsufuji et al., 1995; Ivanov et al., 1998a) . A pseudoknot 3¢ of the shift site is a common stimulator for eukaryotic ±1 frameshifting, but the synthesis of antizyme is the only known case utilizing +1 frameshifting.

Comparative analysis of RNA sequences from different organisms is informative about important features and the different options selected by evolution. Since most of the known examples of programmed frameshifting are in viruses or chromosomal mobile elements, the opportunity for comparison of frameshift cassettes in divergent organisms where the time of divergence can be approximated is limited. A start has been made with the frameshifting required for bacterial release factor 2 expression (Persson and Atkins, 1998) , but antizyme provides the ®rst opportunity for such a comparison in eukaryotes. Antizyme genes in genetically tractable lower eukaryotes would be helpful for understanding the functionally important interactions responsible for autoregulatory programmed frameshifting.

Identi®cation of an antizyme gene in Schizosaccharomyces pombe A search for DNA sequences encoding protein sequences homologous to Drosophila melanogaster antizyme (Ivanov et al., 1998b) and Homo sapiens antizyme 1 identi®ed the same S.pombe anonymous cDNA clone (DDBJ/EMBL/GenBank accession No. D89228). The similarity is limited (~10% identity, 24% similarity to both human antizyme 1 and D.melanogaster antizyme); however, it is highest in regions that are most highly conserved among the previously identi®ed antizymes ( Figure 1A ). Closer examination of the cDNA nucleotide sequence provided further evidence that it encodes an S.pombe homolog of antizyme. The initiating AUG codon for the ORF that is similar to higher eukaryotic antizymes (ORF2 of those genes) is not the 5¢-most AUG in this cDNA. In fact, there are eight AUGs closer to the 5¢ end. The ®rst or the second AUGs would initiate translation of an ORF (ORF1) that overlaps the longer downstream ORF (ORF2) such that a +1 translational frameshifting event in the overlap would generate a protein product analogous to the products of antizyme genes from higher eukaryotes. Furthermore, the last 12 nucleotides of ORF1 (UGG-UGC-UCC-UGA) are identical to the last 12 nucleotides of mammalian antizyme 1 ORF1s, including the frameshift site. Eleven of these 12 nucleotides are identical to the corresponding regions of all previously identi®ed antizyme genes ( Figure 1B ). Previous experiments with the mammalian frameshift sequence tested in S.pombe have shown that this short 12 nucleotide sequence, by itself, is suf®cient to stimulate measurable levels (up to 0.5%) of +1 frameshifting (Ivanov et al., 1998c) . To con®rm the ORF con®guration of the putative S.pombe antizyme gene, a region corresponding to the two overlapping ORFs plus~80 nucleotides of the 5¢ UTR and 370 nucleotides of the 3¢ UTR, was ampli®ed from both S.pombe genomic DNA and a cDNA library. The sequence of the ampli®ed DNA con®rmed that there are indeed two overlapping ORFs with the deduced con®guration. This sequence (DDBJ/EMBL/GenBank accession No. AF217277) differs from the previously sequenced cDNA clone by three nucleotides (two in the coding region and one in the 3¢ UTR); one changes an alanine codon to proline, another is a silent mutation within a proline codon. Since the sequences from the cDNA library and genomic DNA are identical, we conclude that the differences with clone No. D89228 are most likely due to strain variation. This gene contains no introns within the ampli®ed region.

The S.pombe protein was tested for antizyme activity using a gene fusion with glutathione S-transferase (GST). In this construct, ORF1 and ORF2 of antizyme are fused in-frame by deleting the T nucleotide that encodes U of the stop codon of ORF1. This GST±antizyme fusion gene was expressed in Escherichia coli and the protein was puri®ed by af®nity chromatography. ODC inhibitory activity was tested by incubating the recombinant antizyme protein with an S.pombe crude extract and then assaying the mixture for ODC activity. The results ( Figure 2) show that the recombinant protein can inhibit S.pombe ODC. GST alone (1 mg) does not inhibit S.pombe ODC (data not shown). In light of these results, the S.pombe gene will be called S.pombe ODC antizyme (SPA). Interestingly, the S.pombe ODC was also inhibited by mouse antizyme 1 and antizyme 2 (both expressed as GST fusions); however, the yeast fusion protein did not inhibit mouse ODC (data not shown).

Deletion and overexpression of SPA Although the effects of overexpression of antizyme on cellular physiology have been tested previously in mammalian cells, the physiological changes associated with complete absence of antizyme activity have not yet been investigated because of the complication of multiple antizymes. The single S.pombe antizyme provides the chance to explore a knockout. SPA deletion strains were I.P. Ivanov et al. generated by replacing the two ORFs of the gene with the ORFs of either URA4 or LEU2 (see Materials and methods). Complete deletion of SPA (both ORFs) did not affect the viability of S.pombe cells in rich (YE) or minimal (MM) media. Temperature had no differential effect on mutant and wild-type cell growth. Similarly, the growth rates, mating ef®ciencies and overall morphology of the knockout strains are apparently indistinguishable from those of wild-type cells (results not shown).

In wild-type S.pombe cells the most abundant polyamine is spermidine followed by putrescine ( Figure 3 ). Spermine and cadaverine are found in much smaller amounts. This distribution of polyamine content is very similar to that in other fungi for which polyamine concentrations have been measured (for references, see review by Tabor and Tabor, 1985) . The effect of SPA deletion on cellular polyamine contents was examined in both exponentially growing and stationary phase cells ( Figure 3 ). The cellular concentrations of putrescine, spermidine and cadaverine (but not spermine) were higher in the knockout strains than in wild-type cells. The greatest effect was seen on putrescine and cadaverine content, with smaller effects on spermidine, presumably because eukaryotic ODC activity directly catalyzes decarboxylation of both ornithine and lysine to produce putrescine and cadaverine, respectively (Pegg and McGill, 1979) , but subsequent regulatory events affect homeostasis of spermidine and spermine. The effect of inactivating antizyme on the polyamine contents in exponentially growing cells is modest (<2-fold in all cases). The effect becomes very pronounced in cells in stationary phase with up to 40-and 10-fold increases of putrescine and cadaverine contents, respectively, in the knockout strains.

To test overexpression of SPA, two versions of the gene were cloned into pREP3 expression vector behind a strong, thiamine-repressible promoter (nmt1). One had the wild- type SPA sequence while in the second, ORF1 and ORF2 are fused in-frame. SPA wild type and an SPA deletion strain were transformed with each of the overexpression constructs. Derepression of the nmt1 promoter is a gradual process since it requires dilution of the intracellular pool of thiamine (the repressor) through cell division. After 2.5 days of exponential growth under derepressed conditions, yeast strains transformed with either SPA overexpression construct show signi®cant increases in doubling time ( Figure 4A ). The growth inhibition is greater with the construct expressing the in-frame version of SPA and after prolonged incubation (5±7 days); these cells cease growth and accumulate in G 1 as determined bȳ ow cytometry (data not shown). The fact that the inframe overexpression construct, which differs by a single nucleotide from the wild-type construct, confers a more severe phenotype is consistent with the hypothesis that translational frameshifting is required for expression of SPA. The growth phenotype associated with SPA overexpression is only partially relieved by adding 100 mM putrescine to the media (1 mM had no further effect) (data not shown). To see whether the slower growth is correlated with aberrant polyamine levels the polyamine contents of the deletion strain carrying in-frame SPA overexpression vector were measured under derepressed and repressed conditions, in both cases after 2 days of exponential growth ( Figure 4B ). As expected, overexpression of SPA results in signi®cant reduction in the intracellular levels of all four polyamines. After longer (4±5 days) incubation under derepressed conditions, no putrescine and cadaverine can be detected (data not shown).

Translational frameshifting during expression of SPA Previously, we developed an assay for measuring antizyme translational frameshifting in both S.cerevisiae (Matsufuji et al., 1996) and S.pombe (Ivanov et al., 1998c) . Brie¯y, the nucleotide sequence to be assayed is inserted between GST and lacZ, such that ORF1 of the assayed sequence is fused in-frame to GST, while ORF2 is fused in-frame to lacZ. b-galactosidase activity provides a measure of frameshifting ef®ciency. To determine whether translational frameshifting occurs in the overlap of ORF1 and ORF2 of SPA, a region of SPA including all but the ®rst codon of ORF1 plus 180 nucleotides downstream of the ORF1 stop codon was tested. +1 frameshifting occurred at 2.2% compared with a construct in which ORF1 and ORF2 are fused in-frame. This result is consistent with +1 frameshifting being crucial for expression of SPA.

Previous experiments have shown that the frameshift cassette of mammalian antizyme 1 can direct ef®cient +1 frameshifting when tested in S.pombe. The reverse experiment was conducted here. The SPA gene was translated in vitro in rabbit reticulocyte lysate and its resulting frameshift ef®ciency measured. With no addition of polyamines, frameshifting ef®ciency is~1.5%. Addition of spermidine to the translation mixture to a ®nal concentration of 1 mM results in a 3.7-fold increase in frameshifting to~5.5%, a level even higher than that observed in the endogenous system in vivo (autoradiogram not shown). The observed ef®ciency of frameshifting with the SPA frameshifting cassette in vivo in S.pombe is signi®cantly more than that expected from its limited nucleotide similarity to the antizyme frameshift sites of higher eukaryotes. This prompted a search for additional stimulatory elements within the SPA frameshift cassette.

The following experiments were done in a strain carrying deletion of SPA (high polyamines) because it gives higher frameshifting and higher b-galactosidase activity in general; however, we obtained similar ratios for mutant to wild-type frameshifting ef®ciency in a strain with the intact SPA gene. Deleting 5¢ sequences up to the third to last sense codon of ORF1 has little or no effect on frameshifting ef®ciency. Deleting all but the last sense codon (UCC) of ORF1 leads to a 4-to 5-fold reduction in frameshifting ef®ciency ( Figure 5A ). This implies that the conservation of the six nucleotides 5¢ of the UCC-UGA frameshift site is due to their importance for stimulating +1 frameshifting. It also suggests that no additional ORF1 sequences of SPA stimulate the +1 recoding event. The 180 nucleotide 3¢ region was searched for possible structure by computer RNA folding algorithms plus visual inspection. The algorithms predicted several minimal structures in that region. 3¢ deletion constructs (constructs del.3,3¢±81,3¢) tested the importance of any putative structure on the frameshifting ef®ciency. The results ( Figure 5B and C) show that all of these deletions lead to a signi®cant (~10-fold) reduction in +1 frameshifting, indicating the presence of a major 3¢ stimulatory element in the 180 nucleotide region immediately following the frameshift site of SPA. However, the results indicate that none of the putative RNA structures in this region are suf®cient for the activity of this element. Several additional 3¢ deletions delineated the boundaries of this stimulatory element from the frameshift site to 150 and 180 nucleotides downstream (since construct del.150,3¢ stimulates 5.5-fold more +1 frameshifting than del.129,3¢, 150 nucleotides downstream probably contain most of the 3¢ stimulator).

In the experiments described above, two of the characteristics of the autoregulatory circuit of mammalian antizyme 1 were con®rmed: SPA inhibition of ODC and the +1 translational frameshifting. The key question left is whether the recoding event is responsive to polyamine levels in cells. As shown above, overexpression of SPA leads to signi®cant reduction of polyamine levels in S.pombe. An SPA + strain was co-transformed with an SPA wild-type overexpressing plasmid (cells overexpressing wild-type SPA grow slowly but continuously) and a construct that monitors the +1 frameshifting from an SPA frameshift sequence. The +1 frameshifting was compared with that in SPA non-overexpressing cells (in both cases frameshifting was measured relative to in-frame control). The results ( Figure 6 ) show a signi®cant reduction (6.5-fold) in frameshifting ef®ciency in SPA-overproducing cells that correlates with a decrease of polyamine content (4.5-fold for putrescine and 3.9-fold for spermidine). This indicates that polyamines modulate the frameshifting ef®ciency of SPA. An alternative but less likely possibility is that SPA overexpression reduces frameshifting because high levels of SPA transcript titrate some factor limiting for frameshifting.

The SPA frameshift signals direct 2-fold more frameshifting in Dspa::LEU2 cells (4.4%) than in SPA + cells (in both cases the measurement is done during stationary phase); however, the relatively high standard deviations for both measurements make it dif®cult to draw ®rm conclusions from this particular result.

A search of Caenorhabditis elegans expressed sequence tag (EST) sequences with mammalian antizyme 1 sequence identi®ed 20 clones. These sequences could be deconvoluted into a contiguous cDNA sequence. Primers designed on the basis of this sequence were used to PCR amplify and subclone this cDNA from a C.elegans cDNA library. The sequence of the subcloned cDNA was con®rmed (DDBJ/EMBL/GenBank accession No. AF217278); the subsequently released genomic sequence of this C.elegans gene (DDBJ/EMBL/GenBank accession No. AF040659) con®rms our cDNA data. The amino acid sequence deduced from the cDNA sequence revealed that the longer ORF has similarity to previously reported antizyme sequences (overall 27% identity, 39% similarity to human antizyme 1; 19% identity, 34% similarity to Drosophila antizyme). These similarities are higher than that of SPA to these two antizyme genes and again are concentrated in the regions most highly conserved among previously identi®ed antizymes ( Figure 1A ). Just like mammalian antizymes, the longer ORF (ORF2) lacks an appropriate in-frame initiation codon, and expression could be provided by initiation in a short upstream overlapping ORF (ORF1) leading to +1 ribosomal frameshifting in the overlap. The putative C.elegans antizyme frameshift site (the nucleotides proximal to the end of ORF1) has 18 of 26 nucleotides identical to the consensus sequence for antizyme frameshift sites ( Figure 1B) .

Frameshifting for expression of C.elegans antizyme was investigated in heterologous systems. Two constructs containing the entire antizyme cDNA, one with the wildtype sequence and one with a single nucleotide deletion that fuses ORF1 to ORF2 in-frame (in-frame control), were transcribed in vitro and the RNA was translated in rabbit reticulocyte lysate. The products were examined by SDS±PAGE (Figure 7) . The main product from both constructs has an apparent M r of 21 kDa, slightly greater than the predicted M r of 17.7 kDa [aberrant, slower than expected, mobility is observed with antizyme proteins from other species (Ivanov et al., 1998a) ]. From the ratio of wild-type to in-frame product, we estimate that the ef®ciency of frameshifting of C.elegans antizyme in reticulocyte lysate is~0.8%, which is somewhat lower than SPA frameshifting in the same system. Addition of spermidine to the translation reactions almost doubles the ef®ciency of frameshifting to~1.5% (the exact numbers are not easy to determine because of dif®culty in de®ning background values). The frameshifting properties of C.elegans antizyme mRNA were also tested in vivo in S.pombe cells. A sequence including all but the ®rst codon of ORF1 plus 180 nucleotides downstream was inserted between GST and lacZ of the PIU-LAC plasmid. Comparison of the b-galactosidase activity of cells (Dspa::LEU2 strain) transformed with the wild-type construct and the in-frame control constructs indicated 3.5% +1 frameshifting. From the frameshifting observed in the heterologous systems, as well as the sequence considerations discussed above, we conclude that expression of this C.elegans gene requires ribosomal frameshifting.

Searching the EST database with the newly discovered C.elegans antizyme identi®ed antizyme orthologs in four other nematode species. In two cases (Necator americanus and Haemonchus contortus), the cDNA sequences in the database were suf®cient to make contigs of the complete coding regions. In the other two cases [Onchocerca volvulus (DDBJ/EMBL/GenBank accession No. AF217279) and Pristioncus paci®cus (DDBJ/EMBL/ GenBank accession No. AF217280)] the complete cDNA sequences were obtained by PCR amplifying and sequencing the full genes from cDNA libraries. As with the previously identi®ed eukaryotic antizyme genes, the ORF con®guration of the newly found nematode orthologs implies the necessity for +1 frameshifting for synthesis of full-length protein.

The C.elegans antizyme mRNA frameshift site UUU-UGA is unique, differing from the UCC-UGA of previously known antizyme mRNAs. The C.elegans antizyme gene shares this feature with N.americanus and H.contortus but not with P.paci®cus and O.volvulus antizymes. The phylogenetic tree of nematode antizyme protein sequences matches exactly the phylogenetic relationship (Blaxter, 1998) of the nematodes expressing them, indicating that these gene sequences are the result of divergent evolution within the nematode lineage (data not shown). These results also show that the UUU-UGA frameshift site evolved after the last common ancestor of P.paci®cus and C.elegans but before the divergence of C.elegans, N.americanus and H.contortus (probably 450± 500 million years ago).

The ability of UUU-UGA sequence to direct +1 frameshifting was further tested in a mammalian system in the context of the mammalian antizyme mRNA (i.e. in the presence of the 3¢ RNA pseudoknot and 5¢ stimulator). A BMV-coat-protein±antizyme 1 gene fusion construct, which has a TCC-TGA to TTT-TGA substitution, was transcribed and then translated in a rabbit reticulocyte lysate. Eleven percent frameshift ef®ciency was seen in the absence of exogenously added polyamines, 2.2 times the ef®ciency seen with the UCC-UGA transcript. The frameshift ef®ciency becomes 18% when 0.6 mM spermidine is added, which is 1.3 times that with the wild type (Matsufuji et al., 1995) . Similar results were obtained in cultured mammalian (Cos7) cells transfected with TTT-TGA mutant construct, the frameshift being higher than that of wild-type construct in both high-and lowpolyamine conditions (our unpublished results). These results demonstrate that the putative C.elegans frameshift site (UUU-UGA) is, if anything, shiftier than UCC-UGA in the antizyme 1 context and is subject to polyamine stimulation.

The results presented show that the yeast S.pombe has a homolog of mammalian antizyme. This is the ®rst documented example of antizyme-type regulation of ODC in a lower eukaryote.

Deleting SPA from the yeast genome has no detectable effect on viability or any other overt phenotypic effect but, as expected, it results in altered accumulation of polyamines in the cell. Interestingly, the effect is most pronounced in cells in stationary phase, where the knockout cells accumulate up to 40 times more putrescine than wild-type counterparts. This compares with a <2-fold increase of putrescine in exponentially growing cells. A likely explanation for this observation is that the usual rate of ornithine decarboxylation in exponentially growing cells is close to capacity given`normal' concentrations of substrate, enzyme and product. At the same time, all newly synthesized polyamines are continuously diluted through Fig. 6 . Effect of polyamine depletion on SPA +1 frameshifting. Polyamine depletion is achieved by overexpression of the wild-type version of SPA. The same cultures were assayed both for frameshifting and polyamine content. Numbers above columns indicate fold reduction of frameshifting and polyamine content compared with cells that do not overexpress SPA. Antizyme genes in S.pombe and C.elegans cell growth and division at a rate that is almost identical to the rate of maximum capacity synthesis. Cells in stationary phase can no longer dilute newly synthesized polyamines, and more importantly lack an effective antizymeindependent mechanism of shutting off ODC. This suggests that SPA is the primary regulator of ODC activity in S.pombe, not only during cell growth (short term regulation) but also in non-dividing cells (longer term regulation).

Overexpression of SPA (5±7 days derepression) leads to complete depletion of intracellular putrescine. This result implies that in S.pombe ornithine decarboxylation is the only source of putrescine synthesis (the pathway from arginine via agmatine is not utilized). The complete depletion of cadaverine in SPA overexpressing cells suggests that ODC is the only enzyme in S.pombe that can decarboxylate lysine, which is also the case in rat tissues (Pegg and McGill, 1979) .

It is somewhat perplexing that addition of putrescine to the media leads to only partial relief of the growth phenotype associated with SPA overexpression. There are two likely explanations. (i) Perhaps S.pombe imports putrescine poorly. (ii) Alternatively, like the mammalian system, maybe SPA inhibits not only ODC but also the polyamine transporter. Further experiments will help to distinguish between these two models.

It is unclear how widespread the antizyme gene is within the fungal kingdom. We have identi®ed and cloned antizyme homologs from two other ®ssion yeasts (Schizosaccharomyces octosporus and Schizosaccharomyces japonicus) and from two distantly related fungi (Botryotinia fuckeliana and Emericella nidulans) (our unpublished results). The antizyme frameshift site of the latter two fungi has evolved in a unique way different from all other known antizymes, but nevertheless even these two distantly related fungi have conserved the autoregulatory +1 frameshifting. The fact that the yeast S.pombe has an antizyme gene suggests the possibility that the higher eukaryotic metazoans may all have an antizyme gene.

The only previously reported antizyme activity in unicellular organisms is from E.coli, but recent analyses suggest that E.coli does not have a true antizyme (Ivanov et al., 1998d) . This makes SPA the ®rst bona ®de antizyme in a unicellular organism.

The remarkable similarity of the core sequence important for antizyme frameshifting from S.pombe to humans could be due to convergent or divergent evolution. The near identity of this sequence in worms, Drosophila, Xenopus, zebra®sh and humans argues against convergent evolution, as if antizyme frameshifting arose in a common ancestor perhaps more than one billion years ago.

Three cis-acting RNA elements are known to stimulate mammalian antizyme 1 frameshifting. One is a 50 nucleotide sequence immediately 5¢ of the shift site (Matsufuji et al., 1995; our unpublished results) . A second stimulator is the UGA stop codon of ORF1 and the third is an RNA pseudoknot starting 3 nucleotides 3¢ of the UGA stop codon. Among frameshift sites of the previously identi®ed antizymes from mammals all the way to Drosophila, there is substantial similarity in the sequences immediately 5¢ of the shift site. Sixteen of the last 18 nucleotides of ORF1 are completely conserved in these genes. Schizosaccharomyces pombe and C.elegans antizymes have 9 of 9 and 6 of 9 (14 out of 19 in O.volvulus) nucleotides identical to the consensus, respectively. For the 5¢ sequences, generally, the more distantly related two antizymes are, the more the similarity is con®ned to the 3¢ end of that region. Our SPA ORF1 deletion data show that mutation of nucleotides that are part of the 5¢ consensus sequence leads to reduced frameshifting ef®ciency. This is another indication that conservation of nucleotide sequence in this region is because of its importance for stimulating ef®cient +1 frameshifting. It is quite striking that in all antizyme gene sequences identi®ed so far, including a number of unpublished ones, ORF1 ends with a UGA stop codon. This is particularly surprising since any of the other two stop codons can substitute for UGA to stimulate antizyme 1 frameshifting, although slightly less ef®ciently, in vitro (Matsufuji et al., 1995) and in vivo (our unpublished results).

The 3¢ pseudoknot that stimulates frameshifting in antizyme 1 is highly conserved in all known vertebrate antizymes, including mammalian antizyme 2 ( Figure 1B) . None of the invertebrate antizyme mRNAs identi®ed so far, including those presented here, has a sequence in the equivalent region that can be simply folded to a comparable RNA structure. However, sequences immediately 3¢ of the frameshift site are conserved between invertebrates and vertebrates. The conservation of this region between Drosophila and the vertebrate counterparts has already been noted (Ivanov et al., 1998b) . The C.elegans antizyme gene contains the sequence YGYCCCYCA (Y = pyrimidine) in this region, which is identical to the consensus. The antizyme genes from the other four nematodes also have a similar sequence ( Figure 1B) . The signi®cance of this similarity is not clear [in fact, sequences in this region appear to play no role in antizyme 1 in vitro frameshifting outside of the RNA pseudoknot context (Matsufuji et al., 1995) ].

Only two examples are known where RNA elements 3¢ of the frameshift site stimulate +1 frameshifting. One is the RNA pseudoknot of mammalian antizyme 1 and the second is a short RNA sequence immediately following the frameshift site of Ty3 (Farabaugh et al., 1993) . Additional examples would be very helpful in deciphering the role such elements play in the mechanism of +1 frameshifting. It is currently not known how many and which of the invertebrate antizyme genes contain 3¢ frameshift stimulators. The results presented here show that an S.pombe 3¢ stimulator enhances frameshifting 10-fold. This stimulator appears completely different from the 3¢ RNA pseudoknot in vertebrates. Our deletion experiments indicate that none of the predicted RNA structures contained within the minimally required 3¢ region [up to 150±180 nucleotides downstream of the frameshift site ( Figure 5C )] are suf®cient to confer the stimulatory effect. The SPA 3¢ stimulator may act directly through sequence or may have an unusual RNA structure involving non-Watson±Crick base pairing. More detailed mutagenesis combined with phylogenetic analysis would be required to discern the nature of the 3¢ stimulator of SPA.

The nematode antizymes were analyzed for the presence of possible 5¢ or 3¢ stimulators¯anking the core frameshift site. Computer RNA folding programs did not identify any potentially interesting structure. More importantly, phylogenetic analysis with the ®ve identi®ed nematode antizymes failed to identify any conservation of primary RNA sequence (or for that matter potential secondary structure) outside of the core region that is shared between two or more members. This could indicate that no such extra cis-acting stimulators exist in nematode antizymes or that they are located in a very different place within the mRNA, for example the 3¢ untranslated region (the latter suggestion is not supported by our sequence analysis).

A common mechanism for frameshifting is re-pairing of the peptidyl tRNA in the new reading frame. However, an alternative mechanism whereby the peptidyl tRNA merely occludes the ®rst base of the next codon, has been documented for yeast Ty3 frameshifting (Farabaugh et al., 1993) . Results of experiments with some mutants of the mammalian antizyme 1 shift site pointed to an occlusion mechanism (Matsufuji et al., 1995) . However, the mechanism with the wild-type, UCC-UGA, shift site is not clear. For C.elegans antizyme the UUU-UGA sequence would be an obvious candidate for a re-pairing since Phe-tRNA could pair perfectly with UUU in both frames. But with UCC-UGA the Ser-tRNA ®rst reading UCC could at best pair two out of three with CCU. This important problem warrants further investigation.

The frameshift ef®ciency of SPA frameshift site is lower than that observed with mammalian antizyme 1 even when both are tested in the same organism (S.pombe) [for the frameshift ef®ciency of antizyme 1 cassette in S.pombe, see Ivanov et al. (1998c) ]. It is possible that the observed ef®ciencies for S.pombe antizyme are arti®cially low because the constructs do not include all the cis-acting stimulatory elements. On the other hand there is no reason why a lower level of frameshifting does not correctly re¯ect the evolved balance with the other characteristics of the complex system such as relative protein stabilities.

Like other core cellular processes, the antizyme polyamine regulatory scheme is conserved from yeast S.pombe to human. It is not obvious why this very special mechanism is so exquisitely preserved over vast evolutionary time. Perhaps there is another whole aspect to the system that our experiments do not yet detect. From this viewpoint it would seem very important to exploit the genetics systems of S.pombe and C.elegans to understand more thoroughly the physiological effects of perturbing the antizyme system.

The SPA gene was ampli®ed using the following primers: 5¢-CAAAACAAGTTTTCATTATTGGTTTTTTTTAAATCAATCCCC (sense) and 5¢-CGTAAATCCAATCTAAATTTAATCTTCAACTAA-ATCATGAAAAGCCTC (antisense). The S.pombe cDNA library used as a template in the ampli®cation was kindly provided by R.Rowley (University of Utah). The C.elegans antizyme gene was ampli®ed using the following primers: 5¢-CCCAGGAATTCCTCGAGTATTTTGA-GTATAATTTTAC (sense) and 5¢-CGGCCGCTCGAGTTAGACCTT-GTAGCTCATGATG (antisense). This same ampli®ed DNA was used to make the constructs for in vitro transcription and translation of C.elegans antizyme by cloning it into pTZ18U plasmid using the SacI and HindIII sites incorporated in the two primers. The in-frame construct was made using a two-step PCR. The cDNA sequences of O.volvulus and P.paci®cus antizyme genes were obtained by performing 5¢ and 3¢ RACE PCR with cDNA libraries, which were kindly provided by Ralf Sommer (P.paci®cus) and Susan Haynes (O.volvulus). The SPA overexpression constructs were made by amplifying the gene with the primers 5¢-GCATCCGAATTCCCAAATCCAAGCATCATACGCC (sense) and 5¢-GCATCCGGATCCGCCAGTGTTCTTACTTTGAGA-TGC (antisense), and then inserting BamHI-digested product between the MscI and BamHI sites of pREP3 plasmid. The in-frame construct was made by two-step PCR and subsequently all in-frame SPA constructs described below were made by one-step PCR using this plasmid's DNA as a template. To make the constructs for frameshift assays in S.pombe, DNA fragments with a given nucleotide length (as described in the main text), were ampli®ed from both the SPA and C.elegans antizyme constructs described above. These fragments were then cloned between the KpnI and BstEII sites of PIU-LAC plasmid (Ivanov et al., 1998c) . The PCR primers included an`AC' spacer between the 5¢ cloning site (BstEII) and the antizyme sequences in order to correct the reading frame. The in vivo frameshifting assays in S.pombe (strains ura4-D18 leu1-32 ade6-M216 h ± and Dspa::LEU2 ura4-D18 leu1-32 ade6-M216 h ± ) were done as described (Ivanov et al., 1998c) . The plasmid for GST±SPA expression was made by PCR amplifying SPA (all but the ®rst codon of ORF1 through the downstream ORF2) from an in-frame template and cloning the product into the EcoRI and XhoI restriction sites of pGEX-5X-3 plasmid. The antizyme frameshift site in the BMV-coatantizyme fusion construct (C3NE) (Matsufuji et al., 1995) was mutated with a two-step PCR. To generate the two knockout strains, Dspa::URA4 and Dspa::LEU2, both ORFs of SPA were replaced exactly with the ORF of either URA4 or LEU2. To accomplish this, two pairs of primers ampli®ed URA4 and LEU2 such that 50±60 nucleotides, which normallȳ ank the two ORFs of SPA,¯ank the ORFs of the two genes. The ampli®ed DNA products were gel puri®ed and 2 mg of each were used to electroporate into ura4-D18 leu1-32 ade6-M216 h ± cells. URA + and LEU + transformants were selected by growth on URA ± and LEU ± media, respectively. PCR screen and partial sequencing, with primers¯anking the regions used for the homologous recombination, con®rmed the SPA disruptions. All DNA clones were sequenced with automated sequencing machines (ABI 100).

Schizosaccharomyces pombe ODC active crude extracts were prepared as follows: S.pombe (strain 1519, leu1-32, h ± ) provided by R.Rowley was grown to OD 600 0.7 in 50 ml of minimal media + LEU. Ten milligrams of lysing enzymes (Sigma) were added, followed by continued incubation for 30 min at 30°C. Cells were harvested and washed once with cold homogenization buffer [25 mM Tris±HCl pH 7, 0.25 M sucrose, 1 mM dithiothreitol (DTT), 20 mM pyridoxal-5-phosphate, 2 mM EDTA] then resuspended in 0.75 ml of homogenization buffer. Cells were broken open and the lysate was clari®ed by centrifugation at 10 000 r.p.m. for 15 min at 4°C. Extracts were dialyzed overnight in dialysis buffer (25 mM Tris± HCl pH 7.4, 1 mM DTT, 20 mM pyridoxal-5-phosphate, 0.1 mM EDTA). A volume of 25 ml of extract was used for each ODC assay. ODC activity was assayed by measuring the release of 14 CO 2 from L-[1-14 C]ornithine (Amersham) as described (Nishiyama et al., 1988) . Each reaction took 1 h. Pre-incubation of S.pombe extract with 0.1 mM di¯uoromethyl ornithine (DFMO) for 15 min led to >99% inhibition of 14 CO 2 release.

The cells were collected by centrifugation, washed twice with 1 ml of phosphate-buffered saline (PBS) and then the pellet was frozen at ±80°C until use. The pellet was resuspended in 0.1 ml of PBS. An aliquot of the suspension was mixed with an equal volume of 8% perchloric acid, vortexed for 1 min, kept on ice for 5 min and centrifuged at 15 000 r.p.m., 4°C for 5 min. Ten microliters of the supernatant were subjected to polyamine analysis using¯uorometry on high-performance liquid chromatography as described previously (Murakami et al., 1989) . Protein concentrations were determined with the BCA protein assay kit (Pierce).

The experiments with the BMV-coat-antizyme fusion constructs were performed as described previously (Matsufuji et al., 1995) . All other plasmid DNA templates were prepared using QIAGEN Miniprep Kit and then digested with HindIII. Transcripts for SPA in vitro translation were made from PCR templates that had a T7 promoter incorporated into the PCR primers. Linearized DNA (1 mg) was used as a template for in vitro transcription with Ambion MEGAshortscript TM T7 Kit. The DNasetreated RNAs were recovered and resuspended in 40 ml of RNase-free water. One microliter of each speci®ed transcript suspension was used in each in vitro translation reaction [0.5 ml of 1 mM amino acid mix ±Met, 7 ml of reticulocyte lysate (Promega), 0.5 ml of [ 35 S]Met (Amersham)] to a total volume of 10 ml. The reactions were stopped by adding 1 ml of RNase (10 mg/ml). The frameshift ef®ciencies were quanti®ed as described (Ivanov et al., 1998a) . Heterogeneous nuclear ribonucleoprotein A1 regulates RNA synthesis of a cytoplasmic virus Heterogeneous nuclear ribonucleoprotein (hnRNP A1) is involved in pre-mRNA splicing in the nucleus and translational regulation in the cytoplasm. In the present study, we demonstrate that hnRNP A1 also participates in the transcription and replication of a cytoplasmic RNA virus, mouse hepatitis virus (MHV). Overexpression of hnRNP A1 accelerated the kinetics of viral RNA synthesis, whereas the expression in the cytoplasm of a dominant-negative hnRNP A1 mutant that lacks the nuclear transport domain significantly delayed it. The hnRNP A1 mutant caused a global inhibition of viral mRNA transcription and genomic replication, and also a preferential inhibition of the replication of defective-interfering RNAs. Similar to the wild-type hnRNP A1, the hnRNP A1 mutant complexed with an MHV polymerase gene product, the nucleocapsid protein and the viral RNA. However, in contrast to the wild-type hnRNP A1, the mutant protein failed to bind a 250 kDa cellular protein, suggesting that the recruitment of cellular proteins by hnRNP A1 is important for MHV RNA synthesis. Our findings establish the importance of cellular factors in viral RNA-dependent RNA synthesis. Introduction hnRNP A1 is an RNA-binding protein that contains two RNA-binding domains (RBDs) and a glycine-rich domain responsible for protein±protein interaction. It is involved in pre-mRNA splicing and transport of cellular RNAs (reviewed by Dreyfuss et al., 1993) . It is predominantly located in the nucleus, but also shuttles between the nucleus and the cytoplasm (Pin Äol-Roma and Dreyfuss, 1992) . The signal that mediates shuttling has been identi®ed as a 38 amino acid sequence, termed M9, located near the C-terminus of hnRNP A1 between amino acids 268 and 305 (Michael et al., 1995; Siomi and Dreyfuss, 1995; Weighardt et al., 1995) . Yeast two-hybrid screening with M9 as bait resulted in the discovery of a novel transportin-mediated pathway for nuclear import of hnRNP A1 (Pollard et al., 1996; Fridell et al., 1997; Siomi et al., 1997) . The function of the cytoplasmic hnRNP A1 has not been well de®ned. Studies have shown that cytoplasmic and nuclear hnRNP A1 exhibit different RNA-binding pro®les. Cytoplasmic hnRNP A1 is capable of high-af®nity binding to AU-rich elements that modulate mRNA turnover and translation (Hamilton et al., 1993 (Hamilton et al., , 1997 Henics et al., 1994) . It has also been shown to promote ribosome binding to mRNAs by a cap-mediated mechanism, and prevent spurious initiation at aberrant translation start sites (Svitkin et al., 1996) .

MHV belongs to the Coronaviridae family of positivesense, single-stranded RNA viruses. MHV replication and transcription occur exclusively in the cytoplasm of infected cells via the viral RNA-dependent RNA polymerase (RdRp) (reviewed by Lai and Cavanagh, 1997) . Initially, the 5¢-most gene 1 of the viral genome is translated into the viral RdRp, which then replicates the viral genomic RNAs into negative-strand RNAs. Subsequently, the negative-strand RNAs are used as templates to transcribe mRNAs, which include a genomic-sized RNA and a nested set of subgenomic mRNA transcripts, all with an identical 5¢ non-translated leader sequence of 72±77 nucleotides and 3¢ co-terminal polyadenylated ends. The subgenomic mRNA transcription of MHV utilizes a unique discontinuous mechanism in which the leader sequence, often derived from a different molecule, is fused to RNAs at the intergenic (IG) sites (i.e. transcription initiation site) to generate subgenomic mRNAs (Jeong and Makino, 1994; Liao and Lai, 1994; Zhang et al., 1994) . The exact mechanism of how these mRNAs are made is still controversial. However, it has been shown that the process of discontinuous RNA transcription is regulated by several viral RNA elements, including the cis-and trans-acting leader RNA Zhang et al., 1994) , IG sequence (Makino et al., 1991) and 3¢-end untranslated sequence (Lin et al., 1996) . There is considerable biochemical evidence suggesting possible direct or indirect interactions between the various RNA regulatory elements. hnRNP A1 binds MHV negative (±)-strand leader and IG sequences (Furuya and Lai, 1993; Li et al., 1997) . Site-directed mutagenesis of the IG sequences demonstrated that the extent of binding of hnRNP A1 to the IG sequences correlated with the ef®ciency of transcription from the IG site (Zhang and Lai, 1995; Li et al., 1997) . Immunostaining of hnRNP A1 showed that hnRNP A1 relocated to the cytoplasm of MHV-infected cells, where viral RNA synthesis occurs (Li et al., 1997) . hnRNP A1 also mediates the formation of a ribonucleoprotein complex containing the MHV (±)-strand leader and IG sequences . These results suggest that hnRNP A1 may serve as a protein mediator for distant RNA regions to interact with each other. Heterogeneous nuclear ribonucleoprotein A1 regulates RNA synthesis of a cytoplasmic virus The EMBO Journal Vol. 19 No. 17 pp. 4701±4711, 2000 ã European Molecular Biology Organization Many cellular proteins, including calreticulin (Singh et al., 1994) , polypyrimidine tract-binding protein (PTB) (Hellen et al., 1994; Wu-Baer et al., 1996) , La protein (Pardigon and Strauss, 1996), Sam68 (McBride et al., 1996) , poly(rC)-binding protein (Parsley et al., 1997) and nucleolin (Waggoner and Sarnow, 1998) , have been implicated to be involved in viral RNA transcription or replication. In addition to MHV, hnRNP A1 has also been reported to interact with human cytomegalovirus immediate-early gene 2 protein, which plays an important role in the regulation of virus replication (Wang et al., 1997) . Furthermore, a yeast protein related to human core RNA splicing factors, Lsm1p, has been shown to be required for the ef®cient replication of brome mosaic virus RNA (Diez et al., 2000) . Recently, Reddy and colleagues demonstrated an inhibition of HIV replication by dominant-negative mutants of Sam68 (Reddy et al., 1999) . However, none of these cellular proteins has been shown experimentally to participate directly in RNA-dependent RNA synthesis.

In order to demonstrate the involvement of hnRNP A1 in MHV RNA replication and transcription, we established several DBT cell lines stably expressing either the wildtype (wt) hnRNP A1 or a C-terminus-truncated mutant lacking the M9 sequence and part of the glycine-rich domain. We showed that the mutant hnRNP A1, which was localized predominantly in the cytoplasm, exhibited dominant-negative effects on viral genomic RNA replication and subgenomic mRNA transcription. In contrast, overexpression of the wt hnRNP A1 accelerated the synthesis of all viral RNAs. Our results provide strong evidence that hnRNP A1 is directly or indirectly involved in MHV RNA synthesis in the cytoplasm and that the C-terminal part of the protein is important for its function. This ®nding thus reveals a novel function for hnRNP A1 in the cytoplasm.

Characterization of stable cell lines expressing the wt and a C-terminus-truncated hnRNP A1 To explore a potential role for hnRNP A1 in MHV RNA synthesis, we established murine DBT cell lines stably expressing the Flag-tagged wt hnRNP A1 (DBT-A1) or a mutant hnRNP A1, which has a 75 amino acid deletion from the C-terminus (DBT-A1DC) ( Figure 1A ). This mutant lacks part of the glycine-rich domain and the M9 sequence responsible for shuttling hnRNP A1 between the nucleus and the cytoplasm. Immunoblot of the whole-cell lysates with an anti-Flag antibody detected a 34 kDa protein in DBT-A1 cells and a 27 kDa protein in three independent clones of DBT-A1DC cells ( Figure 1B ), whereas no protein was cross-reactive to the anti-Flag antibody in the control cell line stably transfected with the pcDNA3.1 vector (DBT-VEC). The amounts of the Flagtagged wt and truncated hnRNP A1 were comparable in these cell lines. A chicken polyclonal antibody against hnRNP A1 detected two endogenous hnRNP A1 isoforms or hnRNP A1-related proteins in the whole-cell lysates of all of the cell lines. The bottom band (34 kDa) overlaps the Flag-tagged wt hnRNP A1 in DBT-A1 cells. There was only a slight increase in the overall amount of hnRNP A1 in DBT-A1 cells as compared with DBT-VEC cells, indicating that the exogenous hnRNP A1 constituted a small fraction of the total hnRNP A1 in the cells. In DBT-A1DC cells, an additional band of smaller size (27 kDa) corresponding to the mutant hnRNP A1 was detected. The overall expression levels of the exogenous hnRNP A1 and hnRNP A1DC were~3-fold lower than that of the endogenous hnRNP A1 in whole-cell lysates ( Figure 1B ). Similar to the endogenous hnRNP A1 protein (Pin Äol-Roma and Dreyfuss, 1992) , the Flag-tagged wt hnRNP A1 was localized almost exclusively in the nucleus ( Figure 1C ). The mutant hnRNP A1, however, was localized predominantly in the cytoplasm ( Figure 1C) , consistent with the previous ®nding that the M9 nuclear localization signal is necessary to localize hnRNP A1 to the nucleus Weighardt et al., 1995) . Thus, hnRNP A1DC was much more abundant than the endogenous hnRNP A1 in the cytoplasm. The expression levels of the wt or mutant hnRNP A1 varied among individual cells based on immuno¯uorescent staining ( Figure 1C ). The growth rate ( Figure 1D ) and cell morphology (data not shown) were similar among the different cell lines.

The effects of overexpression of the wt and mutant hnRNP A1 on syncytium formation and virus production We ®rst assessed the effects of hnRNP A1 overexpression on the morphological changes induced by MHV-A59 infection using several different clones of DBT cell lines. Virus infection was performed at a multiplicity of infection (m.o.i.) of 0.5 to detect the subtle morphological differences among the different cell lines. Syncytia appeared at~7 h post-infection (p.i.) in DBT-VEC cells and~1 h earlier in DBT-A1 cells. At both 8 and 14 h p.i., syncytia were signi®cantly larger and more spread out in DBT-A1 cells than those in DBT-VEC cells ( Figure 2A ). Similar differences were observed with two additional clones of DBT-A1 cells (data not shown). In contrast, no syncytium was observed in three different clones of DBT-A1DC cells, even at 14 h p.i. At 24 h p.i., almost all DBT-A1 cells detached from the plate, but~10±20% of DBT-VEC cells still remained on the plate (data not shown). Remarkably, there was no sign of syncytium formation in DBT-A1DC cells until 24 h after virus infection, when the overall morphology of the cells was similar to that of DBT-VEC cells at 7 h p.i. (data not shown). All of the DBT-A1DC cells were eventually killed at~48 h p.i., suggesting that the inhibition of viral replication was not a result of the disruption of the MHV receptor. Correspondingly, virus production from these cell lines was signi®cantly different. Between 6 and 14 h p.i., virus production from DBT-A1DC cells was 100-to 1000-fold less than that from DBT-VEC and DBT-A1 cells ( Figure 2B ). DBT-A1 cells produced twice as many viruses as those from DBT-VEC cells during that time period.

Relocalization of hnRNP A1 during MHV infection MHV RNA synthesis occurs exclusively in the cytoplasm of infected cells. In order for hnRNP A1 to participate directly in viral transcription, it has to be recruited to the site of RNA synthesis. Although hnRNP A1 shuttles between the nucleus and the cytoplasm in normal cells (Pin Äol-Roma and Dreyfuss, 1992) , the level of cytoplasmic hnRNP A1 is very low. We have demonstrated previously that hnRNP A1 relocates from the nucleus to the cytoplasm of MHV-infected cells (Li et al., 1997) . To determine whether the overexpressed hnRNP A1 may participate in MHV RNA synthesis, we performed immunostaining experiments using an anti-Flag antibody to localize Flag-tagged hnRNP A1. In DBT-A1 cells, a signi®cant increase in the cytoplasmic level of hnRNP A1 and a corresponding decrease of nuclear hnRNP A1 were observed in virus-infected cell syncytia at 7 h p.i.

( Figure 3B ); these cells express the MHV nucleocapsid (N) protein in the cytoplasm ( Figure 3A ). By comparison, in the uninfected cells, which did not have N protein staining, hnRNP A1 was predominantly localized to the nucleus (arrow in Figure 3B ). In DBT-A1DC cells, very few cells were stained positive for the MHV N protein at 7 h p.i. ( Figure 3C ). Signi®cantly, the viral N protein was detected only in the cells that were stained weakly or not at all for Flag-hnRNP A1 ( Figure 3D ), suggesting that the expression of a high level of hnRNP A1DC interfered with viral replication. The effects of wt and mutant hnRNP A1 on MHV protein production We further investigated the effects of the wt and mutant hnRNP A1 on the production of MHV structural and nonstructural proteins. Cytoplasmic protein was extracted from infected cell lines at different time points after infection for immunoblot analysis to detect an open reading frame (ORF) 1a product, p22 (Lu et al., 1998) and the N protein. p22 expression in DBT-VEC cells was clearly detected at 6 h p.i. and peaked at~16 h p.i. ( Figure 4A ). In DBT-A1 cells, p22 appeared at 5 h p.i. and peaked at~8 h p.i. In DBT-A1DC cells, no p22 protein was detected until 16 h p.i. Similar patterns of differences were observed for the N protein in these three cell lines. Actin levels in different cell lines remained relatively constant throughout the infection, except that, in DBT-A1 cells, actin was not detected at 16 and 24 h p.i. due to the loss of the dead cells ( Figure 4A ). These results clearly demonstrated that overexpression of the wt hnRNP A1 accelerated viral protein production, whereas expression of the mutant hnRNP A1 delayed it. We also performed immuno¯uorescent staining of the N protein at 7 h p.i. to further con®rm the western blot results. As represented by images shown in Figure 4B , there were more DBT-A1 cells stained positive for the N protein than DBT-VEC cells. Very few cells were found to express the N protein in DBT-A1DC cells. The p22 and N proteins appeared as doublets in some of the lanes of Figure 4A , but the results varied from experiment to experiment. The N protein is known to be phosphorylated (Stohlman and Lai, 1979) . Whether p22 is post-translationally modi®ed is not known. Figure 5A ). DBT-A1 cells showed a signi®cantly higher level of [ 3 H]uridine incorporation, which peaked at~8 h p.i. DBT-A1DC cells did not show any detectable level of incorporation of the radioactivity. These results suggest that hnRNP A1 regulates MHV RNA synthesis. We further assessed the production of genomic and subgenomic MHV RNAs in these cell lines by northern blot analysis. The genomic and the six subgenomic RNA species were detected at 8 h p.i. in both DBT-VEC and DBT-A1 cells; there were signi®cantly higher steady-state levels of all of the RNA species in DBT-A1 cells ( Figure 5B ). In contrast, no viral RNA was detected in DBT-A1DC cells at that time point. At 16 h p.i., MHV RNA levels in DBT-VEC and DBT-A1 cells decreased generally because of the loss of the dead cells, while the smaller subgenomic RNAs became detectable in DBT-A1DC cells. By 24 h p.i., most viral RNA species became detectable in DBT-A1DC cells ( Figure 5B , lane 10), while most of the DBT-A1 cells were dead (lane 9). These results con®rmed that the synthesis of all of the viral RNA species is accelerated by overexpression of the wt hnRNP A1 and delayed by a dominant-negative mutant of hnRNP A1.

In this analysis, we also detected an additional RNA species (arrow in Figure 5B ), which was determined to be a defective-interfering (DI) RNA by northern blot analysis using a probe representing the 5¢-untranslated region (without the leader), which is present only in genomic and DI RNAs (data not shown). Interestingly, this DI RNA was inhibited to a greater extent than other RNA species in DBT-A1DC cells. This result suggests that the replication of DI RNAs is more sensitive to the dominant-negative inhibition by cytoplasmic hnRNP A1.

To demonstrate further that MHV RNA transcription machinery is defective in cells expressing the mutant hnRNP A1, we studied transcription of an MHV DI RNA, 25CAT, which contains a transcription promoter (derived from the IG sequence for mRNA 7, IG7) and a chloramphenicol acetyltransferase (CAT) reporter gene . CAT activity can be expressed from At 1 h p.i., serum-free medium was replaced by virus growth medium containing 1% NCS and 5 mg/ml actinomycin D. [ 3 H]uridine (100 mCi/ml) was added to the infected cells at 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 16 and 24 h p.i. After 1 h labeling, cytoplasmic extracts were prepared and precipitated with 5% TCA. The TCA-precipitable counts were measured in a scintillation counter. (B) Northern blot analysis of MHV genomic and subgenomic RNA synthesis in DBT cells. Cytoplasmic RNA was extracted from MHV-A59-infected cells at 8, 16 and 24 h p.i. for northern blot analysis. The naturally occurring DI RNA of MHV-A59 is indicated by an arrow. this DI RNA only if a subgenomic mRNA containing CAT sequences is produced . The 25CAT RNA was transfected into MHV-A59-infected cells 1 h after infection. At 8 h p.i., CAT activity in DBT-A1 cells was signi®cantly higher than that in DBT-VEC cells ( Figure 6A ). On the other hand, CAT activity was very low in DBT-A1DC cells. At 24 h p.i., CAT activity in DBT-A1 cells became slightly lower than that in DBT-VEC cells because of the loss of the dead DBT-A1 cells. The CAT activity in DBT-A1DC was still signi®cantly lower than that in DBT-VEC or DBT-A1 cells. These results established that mRNA transcription from the DI RNA was also inhibited by hnRNP A1DC.

The results shown above ( Figure 5B ) also suggest that DI RNA replication is more sensitive to the inhibitory effects of the hnRNP A1 mutant. To con®rm this result, we further studied replication of another DI RNA during serial virus passages. DBT cells were infected with MHV-A59 and transfected with DIssE RNA derived from JHM virus (Makino and Lai, 1989) ; the virus released (P0) was passaged twice in DBT cells to generate P1 and P2 viruses. DBT cells were infected with these viruses, and cytoplasmic RNA was extracted for northern blot analysis using glyoxalated RNA for a better resolution of smaller RNAs. For DBT-A1DC cells, RNA was extracted at 36 h p.i. since viral RNA synthesis was delayed in this cell line. Cells infected with P0 viruses did not yield detectable amounts of DIssE, but contained the naturally occurring A59 DI RNA, whose replication was inhibited more strongly than the synthesis of MHV genomic and subgenomic RNAs in DBT-A1DC cells ( Figures 5B, lanes 8±10 and 6B, lanes 1± 3). However, this A59 DI RNA was not detectable in cells infected with P1 and P2 viruses ( Figure 6B , lanes 4±9). In contrast, DIssE appeared in cells infected with P1 viruses and further increased in cells infected with P2 viruses, indicating that the replication of the smaller DIssE may have an inhibitory effect on the replication of the larger A59 DI RNA (Jeong and Makino, 1992) . Similar to the A59 DI RNA, the replication of DIssE RNA was much more strongly inhibited than that of MHV genomic and subgenomic RNAs in DBT-A1DC cells ( Figure 6B , lanes 6 and 9). Our results thus suggest that MHV DI RNA replication is more dependent on the function of cytoplasmic hnRNP A1.

The mechanism of dominant-negative inhibition by the C-terminal deletion mutant of hnRNP A1 To understand the underlying mechanism of the inhibition of MHV RNA transcription by the C-terminal-deletion mutant of hnRNP A1, we ®rst examined the RNA-and protein-binding properties of this mutant protein.

Electrophoretic mobility shift assay demonstrated that hnRNP A1DC retained the ability to bind the MHV (±)strand leader RNA and to form multimers with itself, similar to the wt hnRNP A1 (data not shown); this is consistent with the fact that both of its RBDs are intact ( Figure 1A) . Furthermore, UV-crosslinking experiments showed that increasing amounts of puri®ed glutathione S-transferase (GST)±hnRNP A1DC ef®ciently competed with the endogenous hnRNP A1 for the binding of the MHV (±)-strand leader RNA ( Figure 7A ), indicating that the binding of hnRNP A1DC to RNA was not affected. These results suggest that the RNA-binding properties of hnRNP A1DC were intact.

We next examined the protein-binding properties of hnRNP A1DC. Since hnRNP A1 has been shown to interact with the N protein, which also participates in MHV RNA synthesis (Compton et al., 1987; Wang and Zhang, 1999) , we ®rst determined whether the dominantnegative mutant of hnRNP A1 retained the ability to interact with the N protein in vitro. GST pull-down assay using various truncation mutants of hnRNP A1 showed that the N protein bound the N-terminal domain (aa 1±163) of hnRNP A1 ( Figure 7B) ; thus, the binding of hnRNP A1DC [equivalent to hnRNP A1(1±245)] to the N protein was not affected. We next examined the in vivo interaction of the wt and mutant hnRNP A1 with an MHV ORF 1a product, p22, which has been shown to co-localize with the de novo synthesized viral RNA (S.T.Shi and The viruses were passaged twice in wt DBT cells to obtain P1 and P2 viruses. Cytoplasmic RNA was extracted from the DBT cells infected with P0, P1 and P2 viruses and treated with glyoxal before electrophoresis and northern blot analysis using a 32 P-labeled (±)-strand mRNA 7 as a probe. The A59 DI RNA and DIssE RNA are indicated by arrows.

M.M.C.Lai, unpublished results) and associate with the viral replicase complex (Gibson Bost et al., 2000) . Cytoplasmic extracts from MHV-A59-infected cells were immunoprecipitated with anti-Flag antibody-conjugated beads, followed by western blotting with a rabbit polyclonal antibody against p22. At 8 h p.i., p22 was co-precipitated with the Flag-tagged hnRNP A1 from DBT-A1 cells, whereas no precipitation of p22 was observed in DBT-VEC cells ( Figure 7C ). For DBT-A1DC cells, co-immunoprecipitation was performed at 24 h p.i., when abundant MHV proteins were synthesized. p22 was shown to co-precipitate with hnRNP A1DC, indicating that hnRNP A1DC still formed a complex with the viral polymerase gene product. These results suggest that the ability of hnRNP A1DC to interact with the N and polymerase proteins was not altered.

We next investigated whether the mutant hnRNP A1 is de®cient in the interaction with any other cellular proteins in this RNA±protein complex. We labeled proteins in MHV-infected cells or mock-infected cells at different time points after infection and immunoprecipitated with the anti-Flag antibody. Signi®cantly, a cellular protein of 250 kDa was shown to be associated only with the wt hnRNP A1, but not the mutant hnRNP A1 ( Figure 7D ), suggesting that hnRNP A1 binds to this protein through its C-terminal domain. We propose that this cellular protein is another important component of the MHV RNA transcription/replication complex.

There is an accumulating body of evidence signifying the importance of cellular factors in RNA synthesis of RNA viruses (reviewed by Lai, 1998) . Previous studies have shown that hnRNP A1 binds to the cis-acting sequences of MHV template RNA and that this interaction correlates with the transcription ef®ciency of viral RNA in vivo (Zhang and Lai, 1995; Li et al., 1997) . In addition, hnRNP A1 is also implicated in viral RNA replication by the recent ®nding that hnRNP A1 interacts with the 3¢-ends of both positive-and negative-strand MHV RNA (P.Huang and M.M.C.Lai, unpublished results). However, hnRNP A1 modulates cytoplasmic viral RNA synthesis the functional importance of hnRNP A1 in viral RNA synthesis has so far not been directly demonstrated. In the present study, we established that MHV RNA transcription and replication were enhanced by overexpression of the wt hnRNP A1 protein, but inhibited by expression of a dominant-negative hnRNP A1 mutant in DBT cell lines.

Our results suggest that hnRNP A1 is a host protein involved in the formation of a cytoplasmic transcription/ replication complex for viral RNA synthesis. This represents a novel function for hnRNP A1 in the cytoplasm.

Our results indicate that the inhibitory effects on MHV replication exhibited by the dominant-negative mutant of hnRNP A1 were relatively more prominent than the enhancement effects by overexpression of the wt hnRNP A1. This is consistent with the subcellular localization patterns of the wt and mutant hnRNP A1 proteins. The overexpressed exogenous wt hnRNP A1 in DBT-A1 cells was predominantly localized in the nucleus, similar to the endogenous hnRNP A1 ( Figure 1C ). The C-terminal-deletion mutant, however, was localized mainly in the cytoplasm. Thus, the level of hnRNP A1DC was much higher than the endogenous wt hnRNP A1 in the cytoplasm of DBT-A1DC cells, where MHV replication occurs. This result explains why hnRNP A1DC could have a strong dominant-negative inhibitory effect, despite the fact that it was expressed at a lower level than the endogenous hnRNP A1 ( Figure 1B) .

The effects of the expression of the wt and mutant hnRNP A1 on virus production ( Figure 2B ), viral protein synthesis ( Figure 4A ) and viral RNA synthesis ( Figure 5A ) correlated with each other. Furthermore, hnRNP A1DC caused not only a global inhibition of genomic RNA replication and subgenomic mRNA transcription, but also a preferential inhibition of at least two DI RNA species. These results suggest that the inhibition of MHV replication by the hnRNP A1 mutant was most likely a direct effect on viral RNA synthesis rather than an indirect effect on other aspects of cellular or viral functions. Since hnRNP A1 binds directly to the cis-acting MHV RNA sequences critical for MHV RNA transcription (Li et al., 1997) and replication (P. Huang and M.M.C.Lai, unpublished results) , it is most likely that hnRNP A1 may participate in the formation of the transcription/replication complex. Indeed, our data show that hnRNP A1 interacts directly or indirectly with the N protein and a gene 1 product, p22, both of which are probably associated with the viral transcription/replication complex (Compton et al., 1987; Wang and Zhang, 1999; Gibson Bost et al., 2000) . hnRNP A1 may participate directly in viral RNA synthesis in a similar role to that of transcription factors in DNAdependent RNA synthesis, e.g. by maintaining favorable RNA conformation for RNA synthesis. Alternatively, hnRNP A1 may modulate MHV RNA transcription or replication by participating in the processing, transport and controlling the stability of viral RNAs. It has been reported that RNA processing of retroviruses, human T-cell leukemia virus type 2 (Black et al., 1995) and HIV-1 (Black et al., 1996) , is altered by the binding of hnRNP A1 to the viral RNA regulatory elements. It is also possible that hnRNP A1 may participate in MHV RNA synthesis indirectly by affecting the production of other host cell proteins, which may, in turn, regulate MHV RNA synthesis. Since hnRNP A1 is a dose-dependent altern-ative splicing factor (Caceres et al., 1994) , even small changes in the intracellular level of hnRNP A1 can alter the splicing of other cellular proteins. Regardless of the mechanism, our study established the importance of cellular factors in viral RNA-dependent RNA synthesis.

The transcription from 25CAT RNA was strongly inhibited by the dominant-negative mutant of hnRNP A1, as shown by CAT assays ( Figure 6A ). In addition, the replication of the naturally occurring A59 DI RNA and the arti®cial DIssE RNA was completely abolished ( Figure 6B) . Surprisingly, the replication of MHV DI RNAs suffered a stronger inhibition by the dominantnegative mutant of hnRNP A1 than the synthesis of MHV genomic and subgenomic RNAs, suggesting that DI RNA replication may be more dependent on hnRNP A1. Although DI RNAs contain all of the cis-acting replication signals that are essential for their replication in normal cells (Kim and Makino, 1995) , the small size of DI RNA may cause it to require more hnRNP A1 to maintain a critical RNA structure. It has been shown that different DI RNAs require different cis-acting signals for RNA replication (Kim and Makino, 1995) .

Our results demonstrate that the C-terminal domain of hnRNP A1, including the M9 sequence and the glycinerich region, is important for MHV RNA transcription and replication, but the mechanism of the dominant-negative effects of hnRNP A1DC is still not clear. hnRNP A1DC retains the RNA-binding and self-association ability and is capable of binding the viral proteins N and p22, which are associated with the transcription/replication complex. It is possible that hnRNP A1DC is not productive due to its inability to interact with other viral or cellular proteins that are involved in MHV RNA synthesis. We have found a protein of~250 kDa that binds only the wt, but not the mutant hnRNP A1 ( Figure 7D ). It remains to be shown whether this cellular protein is involved in MHV RNA synthesis.

In our preliminary study, we found that MHV could replicate in an erythroleukemia cell line, CB3, which was reported to lack detectable hnRNP A1 expression as a result of a retrovirus integration in one allele and loss of the other allele (Ben-David et al., 1992) . Since hnRNP A1 protein is involved in a variety of important cellular functions, including RNA splicing, transport, turnover and translation, it is conceivable that other redundant gene products may substitute for the function of hnRNP A1 in CB3 cells. Indeed, UV-crosslinking assays using CB3 cell extracts detected two proteins comparable to hnRNP A1 in size that could interact with the MHV negative-strand leader RNA (data not shown). These proteins may represent hnRNP A1-related proteins, since many of such hnRNPs exist in the cells (Buvoli et al., 1988; Burd et al., 1989) . Therefore, multiple cellular proteins may have the capacity to be involved in MHV RNA synthesis.

Based on previous ®ndings (Kim and Makino, 1995; Zhang and Lai, 1995; Li et al., 1997) and the results from this study, we propose a model for the regulation of transcription/replication of MHV RNA by hnRNP A1. We hypothesize that hnRNP A1 is one of the components of the MHV RNA transcription or replication complex, and the crosstalk between hnRNP A1 and another viral or cellular RNA-binding protein (designated X in Figure 8 ) is essential for MHV replication and transcription. The X protein binds to the C-terminus of hnRNP A1 and cooperates with hnRNP A1 to recruit more proteins to form the transcription or replication complex. The C-terminaldeletion mutant of hnRNP A1 loses the ability to interact with the X protein and to bring it into the initiation complex, resulting in an inhibition of MHV RNA transcription and replication. The residual replication and transcription activities of MHV RNA in the absence of functional hnRNP A1 may be due to a limited af®nity of the X protein to a cis-acting signal that is only present in MHV genomic RNA (site B). On the other hand, DI RNAs may lack this cis-acting signal. When the crosstalk between the X protein and hnRNP A1 is abolished by the dominant-negative mutant of hnRNP A1, the X protein can no longer participate in the formation of the initiation complex, resulting in a complete loss of DI RNA replication.

In summary, our data provide direct experimental evidence that hnRNP A1 is involved directly or indirectly in MHV RNA synthesis, probably by participating in the formation of an RNA transcription/replication complex. This ®nding reveals a novel cytoplasmic function for hnRNP A1.

Cells and viruses DBT cells, a mouse astrocytoma cell line (Hirano et al., 1974) , were cultured in Eagle's minimal essential medium (MEM) supplemented with 7% newborn calf serum (NCS) and 10% tryptone phosphate broth. MHV strain A59 (Robb and Bond, 1979) was propagated in DBT cells and maintained in virus growth medium containing 1% NCS.

Plasmid construction and establishment of DBT stable cell lines The cDNA of the murine hnRNP A1 gene was ampli®ed by RT±PCR using RNA extracted from DBT cells and a set of primers representing the 5¢-and 3¢-ends of hnRNP A1-coding region, and cloned into pcDNA3.1 (Invitrogen, Carlsbad, CA). The 8 amino acid Flag tag was attached to the N-terminus of hnRNP A1 by including the Flag tag in the forward PCR primer. The truncated hnRNP A1DC was similarly constructed using a PCR-ampli®ed fragment that represents hnRNP A1 (aa 1±245).

For the establishment of permanent DBT cell lines, pcDNA3.1 alone or the plasmid containing the Flag-tagged hnRNP A1 or hnRNP A1DC was transfected into 60% con¯uent DBT cells using DOTAP according to the manufacturer's instructions (Boehringer Mannheim, Indianapolis, IN) . After 4 h, the transfected cells were selected in DBT cell medium containing 0.5 mg/ml Geneticin (G418) (Omega Scienti®c, Tarzana, CA) for 10 days. Single colonies were then collected and cultured individually for 10 additional days before screening for the expression of Flag-tagged proteins.

The polyclonal rabbit antibody against p22 was a gift from Dr Susan C.Baker at Loyola University, IL. The chicken polyclonal antibody against hnRNP A1 was produced by Aves Labs, Inc. (Tigard, OR) by immunizing chickens with the puri®ed mouse hnRNP A1 protein expressed in bacteria. The polyclonal anti-Flag antibody was purchased from Af®nity Bioreagents (Golden, CO). The goat polyclonal antibody against actin was obtained from Santa Cruz Biotechnology (Santa Cruz, CA). The mouse monoclonal antibody against the N protein has been described previously (Fleming et al., 1983) .

Examination of growth rate of permanent DBT cells Equal numbers (1 3 10 5 ) of DBT-VEC, DBT-A1 and DBT-A1DC cells were plated in 10-cm culture plates and maintained in culture medium for 4 days. Cells were trypsinized, stained with Trypan Blue (Gibco-BRL, Grand Island, NY) and counted at 24-h intervals with a hemacytometer (Hausser Scienti®c, Horsham, PA).

Plaque assay DBT cells in 10-cm plates were infected with MHV-A59 at an m.o.i. of 2. After 1 h for virus adsorption, the cells were washed three times with serum-free MEM, which was then replaced with virus growth medium containing 1% serum. At 1, 6, 8, 10, 14 and 24 h p.i., 1 ml of medium was taken from each plate for plaque assay.

[ 3 H]uridine labeling of MHV RNA Cells plated in 6-well plates were infected with MHV-A59 at an m.o.i. of 2. At 1 h p.i., 5 mg/ml actinomycin D was added to the virus growth medium to inhibit cellular RNA synthesis. To label newly synthesized MHV RNA, 100 mCi/ml of [ 3 H]uridine (NEN, Boston, MA) were added to the medium at hourly intervals. After 1 h of labeling, the cells were washed twice in ice-cold PBS and scraped off the plates in 1 ml of PBS. The cells were then collected by centrifugation and incubated in 200 ml of NTE buffer (150 mM NaCl, 50 mM Tris pH 7.5, 1 mM EDTA) containing 0.5% NP-40, 0.5 mM dithiothreitol (DTT) and 400 U/ml of RNasin on ice for 15 min. After centrifugation, 5 ml of the cytoplasmic extract were spotted on a piece of 3 mm paper and incubated with 5% trichloroacetic acid (TCA). The radioactivity remaining on the 3 mm paper was measured in a scintillation counter.

Northern blot analysis DBT cells were infected with MHV-A59 at an m.o.i. of 2. At 8, 16 and 24 h p.i., cytoplasmic extract was prepared as described above and subjected to phenol/chloroform extraction and ethanol precipitation to purify cytoplasmic RNA. Approximately 10 mg of RNA were separated by electrophoresis on a 1.2% formaldehyde-containing agarose gel and transferred to a nitrocellulose membrane. For a better resolution of the DIssE RNA ( Figure 6B ), RNA was glyoxalated before being electrophoresed on a 1% agarose gel. An in vitro transcribed, 32 P-labeled negative-strand mRNA 7 of MHV-JHM was used as a probe to detect MHV genomic and subgenomic RNAs. For detecting DI RNA species, RNA blots were probed with an RNA representing a sequence complementary to the sequence of the 5¢-untranslated region of MHV-JHM RNA, but excluding the leader sequence.

Western blot analysis DBT cells in 6-well plates were infected with MHV-A59 and cytoplasmic extracts were prepared as described previously (Li et al., 1997) at various hnRNP A1 modulates cytoplasmic viral RNA synthesis time points p.i. The extracts were electrophoresed on a 12% polyacrylamide gel and transferred to a nitrocellulose membrane for western blotting.

Immuno¯uorescence staining Cells were washed in phosphate-buffered saline (PBS) and ®xed in 4% formaldehyde for 20 min at room temperature, followed by 5 min in ±20°C acetone. Primary antibodies were diluted in 5% bovine serum albumin and incubated with cells for 1 h at room temperature. After three washes in PBS,¯uorescein-conjugated secondary antibodies were added to cells at 1:200 dilution for 1 h at room temperature. FITC-or TRITCconjugated secondary antibodies were used to generate green or red uorescence. Cells were then washed in PBS and mounted in Vectashield (Vector Laboratories, Burlingame, CA).

UV-crosslinking assay UV-crosslinking assay was performed as described previously (Huang and Lai, 1999) . In brief, DBT cell extracts (30 mg protein), 200 mg/ml tRNA and 10 4 c.p.m. of an in vitro transcribed, 32 P-labeled negativestrand MHV 5¢-end RNA (182 bp) were incubated for 10 min at 30°C. Increasing amounts of puri®ed GST (0, 0.5, 1.5 and 5 ng) or recombinant GST±hnRNP A1 fusion protein (0, 1, 3 and 10 ng) were included in the reaction to compete with the endogenous hnRNP A1 for binding. The reaction mixture was placed on ice and UV-irradiated in a UV Stratalinker 2400 (Stratagene) for 10 min, followed by digestion with 400 mg/ml RNase A for 15 min at 37°C. The protein±RNA complexes were then separated on a 10% SDS±polyacrylamide gel and visualized by autoradiography.

GST pull-down assay GST pull-down was performed as described previously (Tu et al., 1999) . In brief, GST±hnRNP A1 fusion proteins on glutathione beads (Pierce, Rockford, IL) were incubated with the in vitro translated, 35 S-labeled N protein in 0.3 ml of GST-binding buffer containing 0.1% NP-40 for 2 h at 4°C. The beads were washed ®ve times with the GST-binding buffer containing 0.3% NP-40. Proteins bound to beads were eluted by boiling in Laemmli buffer for 5 min and separated on a 10% polyacrylamide gel.

[ 35 S]methionine labeling and immunoprecipitation DBT cells were infected with MHV-A59 at an m.o.i. of 2. The cells were incubated with methionine-free medium for 30 min before labeling and were labeled in 100 mCi/ml [ 35 S]methionine starting at 1.5, 7 or 24 h p.i. After labeling for 2 h at each time point, the cells were harvested for protein extraction as described previously (Li et al., 1997) . The protein extracts were immunoprecipitated with anti-Flag antibody-conjugated beads (Sigma, St Louis, MO) in Tm 10 buffer (50 mM Tris±HCl pH 7.9, 0.1 M KCl, 12.5 mM MgCl 2 , 1 mM EDTA, 10% glycerol, 1 mM DTT, 0.1% NP-40, 1 mM phenylmethylsulfonyl¯uoride) at 4°C for 2 h. The immunoprecipitates were washed and separated on a 4±15% gradient SDS±polyacrylamide gel and visualized by autoradiography.

Plasmid 25CAT was linearized by XbaI and in vitro transcribed with T7 RNA polymerase to produce the DI RNA . The DI RNA was transfected into MHV-A59-infected DBT cells using DOTAP as described previously (Huang and Lai, 1999) . In brief,~80% con¯uent DBT cells were infected by MHV-A59 at an m.o.i. of 10. At 1 h p.i., the cells were transfected with 5 mg of in vitro transcribed DI RNA and incubated at 37°C for the desired lengths of time. To amplify the DI RNA, viruses (P0) were passaged twice in wt DBT cells to generate P1 and P2 viruses.

Cells were harvested at 8 or 24 h p.i. and lysed by freezing and thawing for three times. After centrifugation at 12 000 r.p.m. for 10 min, the supernatant was used in a CAT assay as described previously (Lin et al., 1996) . A Method to Identify p62's UBA Domain Interacting Proteins The UBA domain is a conserved sequence motif among polyubiquitin binding proteins. For the first time, we demonstrate a systematic, high throughput approach to identification of UBA domain-interacting proteins from a proteome-wide perspective. Using the rabbit reticulocyte lysate in vitro expression cloning system, we have successfully identified eleven proteins that interact with p62’s UBA domain, and the majority of the eleven proteins are associated with neurodegenerative disorders, such as Alzheimer’s disease. Therefore, p62 may play a novel regulatory role through its UBA domain. Our approach provides an easy route to the characterization of UBA domain interacting proteins and its application will unfold the important roles that the UBA domain plays. p62 is a novel cellular protein which was initially identified in humans as a phosphotyrosine independent ligand of the src homology 2 (SH2) domain of p56 lck (1, 2) . p56 lck is a member of the c-src family of cytoplasmic tyrosine kinases that is found predominantly in cells of lymphoid origin (3, 4) . In addition to the interaction with p56 lck , p62 also associates with the Ser/Thr kinase (1, 2) , atypical protein kinase C (5, 6) , and ubiquitin (7) . In addition to the SH2 domain, p62 possesses several structural motifs, including a ubiquitin associated (UBA) domain that is capable of binding ubiquitin nonconvalently (8, 9) . Ubiquitin (Ub) is a small polypeptide of 76 amino acids that can be convalently attached to other proteins at specific lysine residues through chains composed of one (mono) or several ubiquitin moieties (poly). In addition to its classical role in protein degradation, ubiquitin is emerging as a signal for protein transport and processing (10) (11) (12) . Conjugation of ubiquitin to substrate proteins requires three enzymes: a ubiquitin activating enzyme E1, a ubiquitin-conjugating enzyme E2, and a ubiquitin ligase E3. Initially, E1 activates ubiquitin by forming a high energy thioester intermediate with the C-terminal glycine using ATP. The activated ubiquitin is sequentially transferred to E2, then to E3 which catalyzes isopeptide bond formation between the activated C-terminal glycine of ubiquitin and ε-amino group of a lysine residue of the substrate. Following the linkage of the first ubiquitin chain, additional molecules of ubiquitin are attached to lysine side chains of the previously conjugated moiety to form branched polyubiquitin chains. The fate of ubiquitinated substrates depends on the number of ubiquitin moieties conjugated, as well as, the lysine linkage of Ub-Ub conjugation. The conjugation of ubiquitin to eukaryotic intracellular proteins is one way in which those proteins are targeted to the proteasome for subsequent rapid degradation. This mechanism is particularly important for short-lived regulatory proteins such as cyclins, cyclin-dependent protein kinase-inhibitors, p53, the nuclear factor kappa B precursor, and IκB (13) . The ubiquitinproteasome system consists of two steps: 1) the target protein is conjugated with polyubiquitin molecules, which mark the substrate for degradation; 2) the target protein is transferred to the 26S proteasome, unfolded and degraded.