Involvement of Tetraspanin C189 in Cell-to-Cell Spreading of the Dengue Virus in C6/36 Cells

Dengue virus (DENV) is naturally transmitted by mosquitoes to humans, infecting cells of both hosts. Unlike in mammalian cells, DENV usually does not cause extremely deleterious effects on cells of mosquitoes. Despite this, clustered progeny virions were found to form infection foci in a high density cell culture. It is thus interesting to know how the virus spreads among cells in tissues such as the midgut within live mosquitoes. This report demonstrates that cell-to-cell spread is one way for DENV to infect neighboring cells without depending on the “release and entry” mode. In the meantime, a membrane-bound vacuole incorporating tetraspanin C189 was formed in response to DENV infection in the C6/36 cell and was subsequently transported along with the contained virus from one cell to another. Knockdown of C189 in DENV-infected C6/36 cells is shown herein to reduce cell-to-cell transmission of the virus, which may be recovered by co-transfection with a C189-expressing vector in DENV-infected C6/36 cells. Moreover, cell-to-cell transmission usually occurred at the site where the donor cell directly contacts the recipient cell. It suggested that C189 is crucially involved in the intercellular spread of progeny viral particles between mosquito cells. This novel finding presumably accounts for the rapid and efficient infection of DENV after its initial replication within tissues of the mosquito.