Zika Virus Subgenomic Flavivirus RNA Generation Requires Cooperativity between Duplicated RNA Structures That Are Essential for Productive Infection in Human Cells.

ABSTRACT: Zika virus (ZIKV) is an emerging flavivirus, mainly transmitted by mosquitoes, which represents a global health threat. A common feature of flavivirus-infected cells is the accumulation of viral noncoding subgenomic RNAs by partial degradation of the viral genome, known as sfRNAs, involved in immune evasion and pathogenesis. Although great effort is being made to understand the mechanism by which these sfRNAs function during infection, the picture of how they work is still incomplete. In this study, we developed new genetic tools to dissect the functions of ZIKV RNA structures for viral replication and sfRNA production in mosquito and human hosts. ZIKV infections mostly accumulate two kinds of sfRNAs, sfRNA1 and sfRNA2, by stalling genome degradation upstream of duplicated stem loops (SLI

SUBMITTER: Pallares HM 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7459552 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature