Hand, foot and mouth disease (HFMD) is a common pediatric illness mainly caused by infection with enterovirus 71 (EV71) and coxsackievirus A16 (CA16). highly purified natural compounds. Thereafter, a cell viability-based secondary screen was performed for the identified hits to confirm their antiviral activities. Three compounds (luteolin, galangin, and quercetin) were identified, among which luteolin exhibited the most potent inhibition of viral infection. In the cell viability assay and plaque reduction assay, luteolin showed similar 50% effective concentration (EC50) values of about 10 M. Luteolin targeted the post-attachment stage of EV71 and CA16 infection by inhibiting viral RNA replication. This study suggests that luteolin may serve as a lead compound to develop potent anti-EV71 and CA16 drugs. family, are the causative agents of HFMD . EV71 infection can cause severe complications and mortality , while nearly 60% HFMD cases are caused by CA16 [8,9]. Importantly, the co?circulation and recombination of EV71 and CA16 have been reported to appear in serious outbreaks in Malaysia, Mainland China, and Taiwan [10,11]. This makes the control of epidemic HFMD more complex and difficult. Currently, there is no available specific vaccine or antiviral drug against EV71 and CA16 . Three candidate vaccines against EV71 have recently completed Phase Ki16425 III trials in Mainland China, all of which have shown good safety and mediated protective effects . Regarding drug discovery, previous studies have reported the anti-EV71/CA16 activities of several natural products (e.g., chrysosplenetin, pendulentin, matrine, glycyrrhizic acid) [14,15,16] and synthetic compounds (e.g., BPROZ series, DTriP?22, rupintrivir) [17,18,19]. However, none of them has been advanced to human clinical trials. The development of antiviral compounds requires appropriate screening assays, which should be rapid and reliable. The current commonly used antiviral assays are based on virus-induced cytopathic effects (CPE). These methods have disadvantages of being time-consuming and labor-intensive, which limit their use for high throughput screening (HTS). In some cases, pseudoviruses have been designed to contain reporter proteins and used for HTS platforms to discover viral infection inhibitors [20,21]. Nevertheless, these tools are unable to represent the entire replication cycle. These shortcomings can be avoided by employing viruses production from full-length infectious clones that contain convenient reporters, which have been generated for various RNA viruses including Visna virus , Chandipura virus , hepatitis C virus , coxsackievirus B3  and EV71 , but not for CA16. Due to the lack of a CA16 high infective cell model, full-length CA16 infectious clones are often difficult to manipulate. Fortunately, this problem has been solved since we have established EV71 and CA16 susceptible cell lines, which stably overexpress hSCARB2 (human scavenger receptor class B, member 2), the receptor of EV71 and CA16 [27,28]. In this study, we established two reporter virus-based HTS assays as primary screens for EV71/CA16 inhibitors: (1) a luciferase reporter infection assay using a pseudovirus (luciferase?encoding RNA replicons encapsidated by viral capsid proteins), which allows screening for inhibitors of viral infection; (2) an enhanced green fluorescent SMAD9 protein (EGFP) reporter infection assay using a full-length infectious clone, which allows screening for inhibitors of any step(s) of the replication cycle. These two assays were utilized for the first time to screen EV71/CA16 inhibitors from a natural compounds library. After the primary screening, a number of hits were re-evaluated by a cell viability-based secondary screening assay with wild-type viruses. Luteolin was selected for having the most potent inhibition of EV71/CA16 infection, and was further evaluated from various aspects such as 50% effective concentration (EC50), 50% cytotoxic concentration (CC50), 50% selectivity index (SI50) and addressed infectious stage. 2. Materials and Methods 2.1. Cells and Drug Library 293T cells, RD cells (human embryonal rhabdomyosarcoma), and Vero cells were cultured as monolayers in Dulbeccos modified Eagle medium (DMEM) (Sigma) supplemented with 10% fetal calf serum (FCS) (10% FCS-DMEM). The RD-SCARB2 (RDS) cell line stably overexpressing hSCARB2, which has been described previously , was cultured in 10% FCS-DMEM supplemented with puromycin (0.5 g/mL; Clontech, Mountain View, CA, USA). The drug library used in this study is a natural product library that contains 400 highly purified compounds Ki16425 (purchased from National Institutes for food and drug control, Beijing, China). All compounds in the library are highly purified and have known chemical structures with low molecular weight. These compounds were dissolved in dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO) to 20 mM. The final compound concentration used in all screening assays was 100 M, with a final DMSO concentration of 0.5%. 2.2. Viruses 2.2.1. Wild-Type Viruses EV71 (genotype C4b) was provided by the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention. CA16 (Genbank accession no. “type”:”entrez-nucleotide”,”attrs”:”text”:”JF695003.1″,”term_id”:”345547523″,”term_text”:”JF695003.1″JF695003.1) was provided by Henan Provincial Center for Disease Control and Prevention. Both viruses were Ki16425 grown in RDS cells. 2.2.2. EV71/CA16-Luciferase Pseudoviruses EV71 and CA16 pseudoviruses containing the firefly luciferase gene replacing the P1 gene were prepared as described previously [29,30]. 2.2.3. CA16-EGFP and EV71-EGFP Viruses 22.214.171.124. Construction of Plasmids The pT7-CA16-EGFP plasmid, which was commercially synthesized (GenBank accession no. “type”:”entrez-nucleotide”,”attrs”:”text”:”AF177911.1″,”term_id”:”5881228″,”term_text”:”AF177911.1″AF177911.1, Generay Bio Co. Ltd., Shanghai, China),.
Hand, foot and mouth disease (HFMD) is a common pediatric illness