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Updated: Aug 20, 2025

Bacterial Artificial Chromosomes: A Functional Genomics Tool for the Study of Positive-strand RNA Viruses
Published on: December 29, 2015
Expansion of viral genomes with viral protein genome linked copies
Reid Warsaba1, Nicolas Salcedo-Porras1, Stephane Flibotte2
1Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, V6T 1Z3, Canada; Life Sciences Institute, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, V6T 1Z3, Canada.
Abstract:
Virus protein-linked genome (VPg) proteins are required for replication. VPgs are duplicated in a subset of RNA viruses however their roles are not fully understood and the extent of viral genomes containing VPg copies has not been investigated in detail. Here, we generated a novel bioinformatics approach to identify VPg sequences in viral genomes using hidden Markov models (HMM) based on alignments of dicistrovirus VPg sequences. From metagenomic datasets of dicistrovirus genomes, we identified 717 dicistrovirus genomes containing VPgs ranging from a single copy to 8 tandem copies. The VPgs are classified into nine distinct types based on their sequence and length. The VPg types but not VPg numbers per viral genome followed specific virus clades, thus suggesting VPgs co-evolved with viral genomes. We also identified VPg duplications in aquamavirus and mosavirus genomes. This study greatly expands the number of viral genomes that contain VPg copies and indicates that duplicated viral sequences are more widespread than anticipated.
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