Assembly and Maturation of the Bacteriophage Lambda Procapsid: gpC Is the Viral Protease

Viral capsids are robust structures designed to protect the genome from environmental insults and deliver it to the host cell. The developmental pathway for complex double-stranded DNA viruses is generally conserved in the prokaryotic and eukaryotic groups and includes a genome packaging step where viral DNA is inserted into a pre-formed procapsid shell. The procapsids self-assemble from monomeric precursors to afford a mature icosahedron that contains a single “portal” structure at a unique vertex; the portal serves as the hole through which DNA enters the procapsid during particle assembly and exits during infection. Bacteriophage λ has served as an ideal model system to study the development of the large double-stranded DNA viruses. Within this context, the λ procapsid assembly pathway has been reported to be uniquely complex involving protein cross-linking and proteolytic maturation events. In this work, we identify and characterize the protease responsible for λ procapsid maturation and present a structural model for a procapsid-bound protease dimer. The procapsid protease possesses autoproteolytic activity, it is required for degradation of the internal “scaffold” protein required for procapsid self-assembly, and it is responsible for proteolysis of the portal complex. Our data demonstrate that these proteolytic maturation events are not required for procapsid assembly or for DNA packaging into the structure, but that proteolysis is essential to late steps in particle assembly and/or in subsequent infection of a host cell. The data suggest that the λ-like proteases and the herpesvirus-like proteases define two distinct viral protease folds that exhibit little sequence or structural homology but that provide identical functions in virus development. The data further indicate that procapsid assembly and maturation are strongly conserved in the prokaryotic and eukaryotic virus groups.