Abstract
Bovine viral diarrhea virus (BVDV) is a pestivirus that can establish a persistent infection in the developing fetus and has the ability to disable the production of type I interferon. In this report, we extend our previous observations that BVDV encodes a protein able to specifically block the activity of interferon regulatory factor 3 (IRF-3), a transcription factor essential for interferon promoter activation, by demonstrating that this is a property of the N-terminal protease fragment (NPro) of the BVDV polyprotein. Although BVDV infections cause relocalization of cellular IRF-3 from the cytoplasm to the nucleus early in infection, NPro blocks IRF-3 from binding to DNA. NPro has the additional property of targeting IRF-3 for polyubiquitination and subsequent destruction by cellular multicatalytic proteasomes. The autoprotease activity of NPro is not required for the inhibition of type I interferon induction or the targeting of IRF-3 for degradation.