Development of specific dengue virus 2'-O- and N7-methyltransferase assays for antiviral drug screening

Dengue virus (DENV) protein NS5 carries two mRNA cap methyltransferase (MTase) activities involved in the synthesis of a cap structure, (7Me)GpppA(2'OMe)-RNA, at the 5'-end of the viral mRNA. The methylation of the cap guanine at its N7-position (N7-MTase, (7Me)GpppA-RNA) is essential for viral replication. The development of high throughput methods to identify specific inhibitors of N7-MTase is hampered by technical limitations in the large scale synthesis of long capped RNAs. In this work, we describe an efficient method to generate such capped RNA, GpppA(2'OMe)-RNA₇₄, by ligation of two RNA fragments. Then, we use GpppA(2'OMe)-RNA₇₄ as a substrate to assess DENV N7-MTase activity and to develop a robust and specific activity assay. We applied the same ligation procedure to generate (7Me)GpppA-RNA₇₄ in order to characterize the DENV 2'-O-MTase activity specifically on long capped RNA. We next compared the N7- and 2'-O-MTase inhibition effect of 18 molecules, previously proposed to affect MTase activities. These experiments allow the validation of a rapid and sensitive method easily adaptable for high-throughput inhibitor screening in anti-flaviviral drug development.