White spot syndrome virus (WSSV) is the causative agent of a disease that has led to severe mortalities of cultured shrimps all over the world. The size of the WSSV genome has been differently reported for different isolates: 305107 bp, 292967 bp and 307287 bp for viruses isolated from China, Thailand and Taiwan, respectively. However, most of the annotated WSSV ORFs encode proteins that have no homology to any known proteins or motifs. To date, only a few WSSV genes have been studied beyond this sequence analysis. Many genes that are important for the completion of WSSV’s infection cycle remain either to be identified or studied further for interpreting their functional involvement during WSSV infection.
Different viral families have developed widely varying strategies that allow infection of host cells and that optimize the survival of that viral family by facilitating further infection. In the previous studies, a region of WSSV067 of Taiwan isolate was investigated to have the similarity to legume lectin alpha-chain prosite. Researches on influenza virus were shown that viruses appear to enter host cells by using the protein-protein interaction between viral lectin and sialic acid (SA) of host cells. Thus, WSSV067 is a best candidate for us to study the protein-protein interaction between viral protein and host receptor. Because the most valuable use of the yeast two-hybrid system has been to identify protein partners for a protein of interest. In this research, we will focus on establishing yeast two-hybrid system and using WSSV067 to screen host receptor.
