The composition of the plasma membrane domains of epithelial cells is maintained by biosynthetic pathways that can sort both proteins and lipids into transport vesicles destined for either the apical or basolateral surface. In MDCK cells, the influenza virus hemagglutinin is sorted in the trans-Golgi network into detergent-insoluble, glycosphingolipid-enriched membrane domains that are proposed to be necessary for sorting hemagglutinin to the apical cell surface. Site- directed mutagenesis of the hemagglutinin transmembrane domain was used to test this proposal. The region of the transmembrane domain required for apical transport included the residues most conserved among hemagglutinin subtypes. Several mutants were found to enter detergent-insoluble membranes but were not properly sorted. Replacement of transmembrane residues 520 and 521 with alanines converted the 2A520 mutant hemagglutinin into a basolateral protein. Depleting cell cholesterol reduced the ability of wild-type hemagglutinin to partition into detergent-insoluble membranes but had no effect on apical or basolateral sorting. In contrast, cholesterol depletion allowed random transport of the 2A520 mutant. The mutant appeared to lack sorting information but was prevented from reaching the apical surface when detergent-insoluble membranes were present. Apical sorting of hemagglutinin may require binding of either protein or lipids at the middle of the transmembrane domain and this normally occurs in detergent-insoluble membrane domains. Entry into these domains appears necessary, but not sufficient, for apical sorting.

The amino acid sequence requirements of the transmembrane (TM) domain and cytoplasmic tail (CT) of the hemagglutinin (HA) of influenza virus in membrane fusion have been investigated. Fusion properties of wild-type HA were compared with those of chimeras consisting of the ectodomain of HA and the TM domain and/or CT of polyimmunoglobulin receptor, a nonviral integral membrane protein. The presence of a CT was not required for fusion. But when a TM domain and CT were present, fusion activity was greater when they were derived from the same protein than derived from different proteins. In fact, the chimera with a TM domain of HA and truncated CT of polyimmunoglobulin receptor did not support full fusion, indicating that the two regions are not functionally independent. Despite the fact that there is wide latitude in the sequence of the TM domain that supports fusion, a point mutation of a semiconserved residue within the TM domain of HA inhibited fusion. The ability of a foreign TM domain to support fusion contradicts the hypothesis that a pore is composed solely of fusion proteins and supports the theory that the TM domain creates fusion pores after a stage of hemifusion has been achieved. INTRODUCTIONMembrane fusion is common to many cellular processes, such as exocytosis and intracellular trafficking. But only in the case of viruses have the proteins responsible for fusion been unambiguously identified. A number of common features have been found among viral fusion proteins. All are oligomerized. The monomer of each oligomer always contains a critical stretch of nonpolar amino acids, known as the fusion peptide (Hernandez et al., 1996;Durell et al., 1997). As crystallographically determined, fusion proteins from several different virus families have the same backbone structure of extended coiled-coil ␣-helices (Bullough et al., 1994;Chan et al., 1997). Because viral fusion proteins of unrelated viruses have common structural patterns, it is logical to assume that their mechanisms of fusion are similar as well. Furthermore, a complex of SNARES, proteins thought to be responsible for the constitutive fusion of intracellular trafficking and the regulated fusion that occurs in exocytosis (Sü dhof, 1995), has been crystallographically determined (Poirier et al., 1998;Sutton et al., 1998). It too displays a long coiled-coil region. Therefore it may well be that the mechanisms of viral fusion pertain more generally to cellular fusion. Influenza virus has long been the prototypic virus for study of fusion mechanisms. It ‡ Corresponding author. E-mail address: fcohen@rush.edu. Abbreviations used: CF, carboxyfluorescein; CPZ, chlorpromazine; CT, cytoplasmic tail; DMEM, Dulbecco's modified Eagle's medium; GPI, glycosylphosphatidylinositol; HA, hemagglutinin; PBS-A-S, PBS supplemented with 0.1% sodium azide and 5% calf serum; p.i., postinfection; pIgR, polyimmunoglobulin receptor; R18, octadecylrhodamine B; RBC, red blood cell; RD, tetramethylrhodamine-tagged dextran; TM, transmembrane; VSV, vesicular stomatitis virus; WT,...

Converting cysteine 543 to tyrosine in the influenza virus hemagglutinin (HA) introduces both a basolateral sorting signal and an internalization signal into the HA cytoplasmic domain. Another HA mutant, HA+8, contains eight additional amino acids at the end of the cytoplasmic domain that include a powerful internalization signal. HA+8 was also sorted efficiently to the basolateral surface of Madin-Darby canine kidney cells. The simplest explanation for the observation that multiple sorting phenotypes depend upon the same small amino acid sequence is that certain tyrosine-based internalization signals might also function as basolateral sorting signals. To test this hypothesis, second-site mutations were introduced into HA C543Y or HA+8 to determine if the internalization and basolateral sorting functions can be separated. For HA C543Y, the same sequence positions were important for both basolateral sorting and internalization, but the two functions responded differently to individual amino acid replacements, indicating that they were distinct. For HA+8, the basolateral sorting signal required the same tyrosine as the internalization signal, but did not share any other characteristics. Thus, even when basolateral sorting signals that depend on tyrosine overlap or are co-linear with internalizations signals, the two sorting processes are sensitive to different characteristics of the sequence.

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