Figure 1.

Several autophagic proteins are beneficial for HCMV production. Stable HFF cell lines either expressing a dominant-negative mutant of ATG4B or knockdown for the indicated autophagic proteins (LC3B, ATG5, BECN1 or ULK1) and their corresponding control cell lines (WT: wild type HFF, shSCR: scrambled shRNA, shNT: non-target shRNA) have been used. (A) Immunoblot analysis of p62, LC3B, ATG5, BECN1 and ULK1 expression confirms the inhibition of autophagy in the indicated cell lines. Actin was used as a loading control. Full-length blots are presented in Fig. S7 (B) Viral titers were determined 10 days post-infection with HCMV AD169 strain at MOI 0.01 in the different cell lines. Error bars indicate SEM from at least three independent experiments. *p < 0.05 (Student’s t test).