Foot-and-mouth disease virus (FMDV), the causative agent of foot-and-mouth disease, is an Apthovirus within the Picornaviridae family. Replication of the virus occurs in association with replication complexes that are formed by host cell membrane rearrangements. The largest viral protein in the replication complex, 2C, is thought to have multiple roles during virus replication. However, studies examining the function of FMDV 2C have been rather limited. To better understand the role of 2C in the process of virus replication, we used a yeast two-hybrid approach to identify host proteins that interact with 2C. We report here that cellular Beclin1 is a specific host binding partner for 2C. Beclin1 is a regulator of the autophagy pathway, a metabolic pathway required for efficient FMDV replication. The 2C-Beclin1 interaction was further confirmed by coimmunoprecipitation and confocal microscopy to actually occur in FMDV-infected cells. Overexpression of either Beclin1 or Bcl-2, another important autophagy factor, strongly affects virus yield in cell culture. The fusion of lysosomes to autophagosomes containing viral proteins is not seen during FMDV infection, a process that is stimulated by Beclin1; however, in FMDV-infected cells overexpressing Beclin1 this fusion occurs, suggesting that 2C would bind to Beclin1 to prevent the fusion of lysosomes to autophagosomes, allowing for virus survival. Using reverse genetics, we demonstrate here that modifications to the amino acids in 2C that are critical for interaction with Beclin1 are also critical for virus growth. These results suggest that interaction between FMDV 2C and host protein Beclin1 could be essential for virus replication.F oot-and-mouth disease virus (FMDV), a single-stranded positive-sense RNA virus, is the causative agent of foot-andmouth disease (FMD), a highly contagious viral disease of domestic and wild cloven-hoofed animals. Seven serotypes of FMDV exist (A, O, C, Asia, SAT1, SAT2, and SAT3), and recovery from one serotype does not provide immunity against the others (7,22). The infectious virion is a nonenveloped icosahedron composed of four structural proteins: VP1, VP2, VP3, and VP4. The genome of approximately 8,400 nucleotides has a single open reading frame (ORF) that is translated into a polyprotein, which is processed by the three viral proteases Lpro, 2A, and 3C into the polypeptide products P1 (VP1 to VP4), P2 (2A, 2B, and 2C), and P3 (3A, 3B, 3Cpro, and 3Dpol). Further cleavage of these regions yields 14 mature virus proteins, along with several protein intermediates, that are needed for viral replication (18,19).During replication, FMDV forms a replication complex produced by the rearrangement of intracellular membranes into vesicular structures containing viral nonstructural proteins (2, 31). Many other positive-strand RNA viruses also initiate production of replication complexes upon infection of a cell (3,4,11,38,39). FMDV 2C, a 318-amino-acid protein, is the largest membranebinding component of the virus RNA replication complex (30)....