Investigation of mechanisms of intracellular trafficking and entry to the central nervous system of West Nile virus and development of therapeutic strategy of West Nile virus encephalitis

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West Nile virus (WNV) is widely distributed in United States and African countries and so on. The mortality rate of WNV encephalitis is still high. This research project attempts to analyze the intracellular trafficking mechanisms of WNV and find basic findings which are related to therapeutic strategy against WNV encephalitis.We found that following cellular entry, WNV subviral particle (SVP) movements could be divided into two phases: early (slow movement) and late (fast movement) phase. Moreover, fast viral particle movement at the late phase correlated with SVP-microtubule association. In addition, we found that the release of WNV from cells is regulated by cellular protein, Rab. According to these results, there are some possibilities to establish the therapeutic strategies against WNV encephalitis in which we can target cellular proteins, such as tubulin and Rab.