Getting on the right track: Interactions between viruses and the cytoskeletal motor proteins

The cytoskeleton is an essential component of the cell and it is involved in multiple physiological functions, including intracellular organization and transport. It is composed of three main families of proteinaceous filaments; microtubules, actin filaments and intermediate filaments, and their accessory proteins. Motor proteins, which comprise the dynein, kinesin, and myosin superfamilies, are a remarkable group of accessory proteins that mainly mediate the intracellular transport of cargoes along the cytoskeleton. Like other cellular structures and pathways, viruses can exploit the cytoskeleton to promote different steps of their life cycle through associations with motor proteins. The complexity of the cytoskeleton and the differences among viruses, however, has led to a wide diversity of interactions, which in most cases remain poorly understood. Unveiling the details of these interactions is necessary not only for a better comprehension of specific infections, but may also reveal new potential drug targets to fight dreadful diseases such as the rabies disease and the acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS). In this review, we describe a few examples of the mechanisms that some human viruses, i.e., rabies virus, adenovirus, herpes simplex virus, human immunodeficiency virus, influenza A virus and papillomavirus, have developed to hijack dyneins, kinesins and myosins. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.