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Isolation of Fidelity Variants of RNA Viruses and Characterization of Virus Mutation Frequency
Published on: June 16, 2011
Strategies for viral RNA stability: live long and prosper
Alexa M Dickson1, Jeffrey Wilusz
1Department of Microbiology, Immunology and Pathology, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO 80523, USA.
None:
Eukaryotic cells have a powerful RNA decay machinery that plays an important and diverse role in regulating both the quantity and the quality of gene expression. Viral RNAs need to successfully navigate around this cellular machinery to initiate and maintain a highly productive infection. Recent work has shown that viruses have developed a variety of strategies to accomplish this, including inherent RNA shields, hijacking host RNA stability factors, incapacitating the host decay machinery and changing the entire landscape of RNA stability in cells using virally encoded nucleases. In addition to maintaining the stability of viral transcripts, these strategies can also contribute to the regulation and complexity of viral gene expression as well as to viral RNA evolution.
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