Why the study?
Existing recombinant rotaviruses expressing fluorescent proteins via the NSP1 ORF have low expression levels and compromised NSP1 function, limiting their utility as probes of viral biology.
Fusing reporter genes to the NSP3 ORF provides a more sensitive probe for rotavirus infection than previous NSP1-based approaches.
Supports improved rotavirus tracking in animal models; leaves open translation to human applications without further validation.
Previous studies generated recombinant rotaviruses that express FPs by inserting reporter genes into the NSP1 ORF of genome segment 5. Unfortunately, NSP1 is expressed at low levels in infected cells, making viruses expressing FP-fused NSP1 less than ideal probes of rotavirus biology. Moreover, FPs were inserted into segment 5 in such a way as to compromise NSP1, an interferon antagonist affecting viral growth and pathogenesis. We have identified an alternative approach for generating rotaviruses expressing FPs, one relying on fusing the reporter gene to the NSP3 ORF of genome segment 7. This was accomplished without interrupting any of the viral ORFs, yielding recombinant viruses that likely express the complete set of functional viral proteins. Given that NSP3 is made at moderate levels in infected cells, rotaviruses encoding NSP3-based FPs should be more sensitive probes of viral infection than rotaviruses encoding NSP1-based FPs.
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Philip et al. (2019) studied this question.
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