Fig. 4: Network representation of the SFTSV N- R. microplus interactome in SFTSV-infected BME6 cells.

a Schematic representation of SFTSV N affinity purification and interactomes identifications (Created in BioRender. Petit, M. (2025) https://BioRender.com/1w1zuzm) b Silver staining of mock or SFTSV-infected BME6 cell lysates following immunoprecipitation. Samples were immunoprecipitated with anti-tubulin as control (blue arrow) or SFTSV nucleocapsid protein N (red arrow). c SFTSV N protein-protein interaction (PPI) networks at 3 or 6 d.p.i., protein abbreviations/names were determined using the EggNOG ortholog search. Dark purple dots indicate SFTSV proteins, bold black line highlights identified interactors of SFTSV-N protein in human cells¹⁰¹, and dashed line represents proteins with previously demonstrated antiviral function. The grey subgroup represents uncharacterized proteins, the purple subgroups represent proteins related to stress granule (purple) and the non-sense mRNA decay pathway (NMD, light purple), while the pink subgroup represents proteins related to mitochondrial stress. Data shown from four independent biological replicates. Significant interactors, all displayed in (c), were identified using two-tailed t tests combined with permutation-based false discovery rate (FDR) statistics. A total of 250 permutations were performed, with the FDR threshold set at 0.05 to ensure robust statistical significance. The parameter S₀ was set to 1 to effectively distinguish background noise from specifically enriched interactors. The corresponding source data are available in the provided Source Data file.