Preferential Translation of Adenovirus mRNAs in Infected Cells

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

Adenovirus (Ad) can infect a wide array of tissuetypes, but most natural infections are confined to the respiratory tract, gastrointestinal tract, or the conjunctiva(for review, see Schneider 2000). Human Ads contain adouble-stranded linear DNA genome 36 kb in size. Adgene expression is organized into an early phase corresponding to expression of genes involved in DNA replication and cell cycle control, which occurs prior to the onset of viral replication. The viral late phase corresponds togenes activated with or after viral DNA replication. Geneproducts synthesized during the late phase of infectionare generally structural and nonstructural polypeptidesthat are required in large amounts for assembly of viralcapsids. Most Ad late gene expression is initiated fromthe viral major late promoter (MLP), which synthesizes alarge precursor RNA corresponding to 80% of the viralgenome. The precursor RNA gives rise to five families oflate mRNAs (L1–L5), which are derived by differentialsplicing and polyadenylation (Fig. 1). Large amounts ofmRNAs also encode pIX and pIVa2 proteins during thelate phase, but from promoters independent of the MLP.MLP mRNAs all contain a common 5′ noncoding region(5′NCR) 212 nucleotides in length known as the tripartiteleader, so called because it is produced by the splicing ofthree small exons (Berget et al. 1977)...