Recombinant adeno-associated virus (rAAV) has gained increasing popularity for gene therapy of numerous organs. As the field has matured in this area, it has become obvious that striking differences in efficiency of transduction to various tissues exist for rAAV. For example, rAAV-mediated gene transfer to muscle and brain is quite efficient, while transduction in the lung is not (
2,
7,
9,
11,
14,
19,
28). Although studies have related these differences in tissue transduction to the phosphorylation state of certain cellular factors, such as the single-stranded DNA binding protein (
19), which may control the transformation of the single-stranded AAV genome into expressible double-stranded forms, others have suggested that the abundance of the AAV type 2 (AAV-2) receptor and coreceptors may be at the heart of differing transduction efficiencies. These studies have suggested that heparan sulfate proteoglycan (HSPG) is the primary receptor for AAV-2 binding (
23), while fibroblast growth factor receptor type 1 (FGFR-1) (
20) and αVβ5 integrin (
22) are coreceptors for efficient binding and internalization of AAV-2 virus. Additionally, studies of the airway have suggested that alternative pathways of viral entry independent of HSPG, FGFR-1, and αVβ5 integrin may occur from the apical membrane following UV-induced rAAV transduction (
9). Despite these observations, little is known regarding the mechanism(s) of endocytosis of rAAV-2 in mammalian cells. Knowledge in this area may aid in identifying alternative approaches to enhance viral entry into cell types for which transduction is normally low.
Two classical mechanisms are involved in the endocytosis of foreign substances into eukaryotic cells. These include phagocytosis of large molecules and receptor-mediated endocytosis through clathrin-coated pits (
16). Critical aspects of clathrin-mediated endocytosis were first identified in
Drosophila following isolation of the temperature-sensitive paralytic mutant,
Shibire. The
shibire gene product is an ortholog to mammalian dynamin I. Mutations in the
shibire gene result in pleiotropic dysfunction of endocytosis in
Drosophila cells (
5). Subsequently, it was demonstrated that the GTPase activity of the dynamin is also necessary for mammalian cell endocytosis (
21). Specifically, oligomerization of dynamin into a ring structure is required for the formation of clathrin-coated vesicles and subsequent pinching of coated pits from the cell membrane. A substitution mutation of lysine to alanine (K44A) in the GTP binding site results in a dominant-negative dynamin I mutant (
25). This mutant form of dynamin has been extensively used to demonstrate the importance of clathrin-mediated endocytosis for transferrin, epidermal growth factor, and insulin through their respective receptors (
4,
5,
13,
26). Interestingly, recent studies indicate that internalization of adenovirus also requires dynamin (
18,
27). Since adenovirus is a helper virus for productive AAV infection and these two viruses both appear to use αVβ5 integrin as a coreceptor, we reasoned that clathrin-mediated endocytosis might also mediate rAAV-2 entry and infection in mammalian cells. To this end, we have evaluated the importance of dynamin-dependent endocytosis of AAV-2 in HeLa cells by using a recombinant adenovirus (rAd) expressing the dominant-negative mutant form (K44A) of dynamin I.