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. 2017 Oct 30;32(5):349–356. doi: 10.1007/s12250-017-4073-9

Extracellular vesicles: novel vehicles in herpesvirus infection

Lingzhi Liu 1,2,4, Quan Zhou 3, Yan Xie 1,2,4, Lielian Zuo 1,2,4, Fanxiu Zhu 1,5, Jianhong Lu 1,2,4,✉
PMCID: PMC6704204  PMID: 29116589

Abstract

Herpesviruses are remarkable pathogens that have evolved multiple mechanisms to evade host immunity, ensuring their proliferation and egress. Among these mechanisms, herpesviruses utilize elaborate extracellular vesicles, including exosomes, for the intricate interplay between infected host and recipient cells. Herpesviruses incorporate genome expression products and direct cellular products into exosomal cargoes. These components alter the content and function of exosomes released from donor cells, thus affecting the downstream signalings of recipient cells. In this way, herpesviruses hijack exosomal pathways to ensure their survival and persistence, and exosomes are emerging as critical mediators for virus infection-associated intercellular communication and microenvironment alteration. In this review, the function and effects of exosomes in herpesvirus infection will be discussed, so that we will have a better understanding about the pathogenesis of herpesviruses. graphic file with name 12250_2017_4073_Fig1_HTML.jpg

Keywords: herpesviruses, extracellular vesicles (EVs), infection, pathogenesis

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundations of China (81372139, 31670171, 81728011), the National Key Research and Development Program of China (2017YFC1200204), the Hunan Provincial Natural Science Foundation of China (2015JJ2149).

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