Frontiers in Cellular and Infection Microbiology | 2021
Editorial: Molecular and Cellular Interactions Between the Host and Herpesviruses
Abstract
Herpesviruses are among the most widely prevalent viruses in humans and associate with multiple diseases including cancer. These viruses can cause different diseases because of their propensity to infect a variety of cell types and establish latent (chronic) infection. Herpesviruses use multiple host’s cell receptors to enter the target, which determines their cellular tropism. Interestingly, virus entry and the establishment of latent infection orchestrates through various host’s and pathogen’s intricate mechanism. One such well-known mechanism is the DNA damage responses, which is efficiently manipulated by the herpesviral proteins for the establishment of viral infection and the induction of viral pathogenesis. Importantly, cells infected with herpesvirus displays two types of viral genes expression profiles, latent and lytic. The latent phase is known to be associated with the expression of minimal viral genes which are associated with maintaining viral genome and the modulation of cellular pathways. During the lytic phase, majority of the viral genes are expressed, leading to the production of progeny virions and the lysis of the infected cells. The quiescent (latent) phase, which is the predominant phase in immune competent individuals, enters into the lytic phase due to multiple cellular/environmental triggers including favorable microenvironments, immunosuppression and other associated co-infection, etc. Evidently virus infection leads to disease pathogenesis by modulating various cellular pathways, including the host cell energy metabolism pathways, for their advantage. Importantly, energy metabolism pathways such as Carbon are regulated differentially in different cells based on the cellular microenvironments. Therefore, targeting these pathways for eradicating virus associated pathogenesis is an important explorative area. Hence therapeutic agents capable of blocking host proteins, gene expression, multiple transcription factors, cellular signal pathways, immune cell activation, transcription factors, cytokines, angiogenesis, invasion, and metastasis, can be effective in preventing pathogenesis. In this Research Topic Madavaraju et al. summarized how Herpes simplex virus (HSV) can infect a broad range of hosts that leads to human diseases. They demonstrate the importance of surface glycoproteins of HSV, which are evolutionarily conserved and show an astonishing