Jung-Eun Park, Tae-Sung Kim, Yan Zeng, Melissa Mikolaj, Jong Il Ahn, Muhammad S Alam, Christina M Monnie, Victoria Shi, Ming Zhou, Tae-Wook Chun, Frank Maldarelli, Kedar Narayan, Jinwoo Ahn, Jonathan D Ashwell, Klaus Strebel, Kyung S Lee
HIV-1 infection elevates the risk of developing various cancers, including T-cell lymphoma. Whether HIV-1-encoded proteins directly contribute to oncogenesis remains unknown. We observe that approximately 1-5% of CD4+ T cells from the blood of people living with HIV-1 exhibit over-duplicated centrioles, suggesting that centrosome amplification underlies the development of HIV-1-associated cancers by driving aneuploidy. Through affinity purification, biochemical, and cellular analyses, we discover that Vpr, an accessory protein of HIV-1, hijacks the centriole duplication machinery and induces centrosome amplification and aneuploidy...
March 5, 2024: Nature Communications