A specific 17-nucleotide stretch in the 5'-noncoding region of the poliovirus genome is conserved and may serve as a useful marker for screening isolates.
May support sequence-based poliovirus screening; hypothesis-generating from animal data and requires prospective validation before any clinical use.
The outbreak of poliomyelitis in Finland in 1984 was caused by a wild strain of poliovirus 3 with uncommon molecular and antigenic properties. We prepared a synthetic oligonucleotide probe complementary to nucleotides 494-510 in the 5'-noncoding part of the genome of a representative strain of the outbreak. This short nucleotide stretch was found to be relatively well conserved within the outbreak and uncommon among 82 independent poliovirus isolates. It may thus be a useful marker for screening isolates to identify those requiring more detailed genetic comparison. The sequences of the corresponding region of the genome are known for 32 separate poliovirus strains and 3 coxsackie B virus strains and show 6 fully conserved nucleotides that could assume a constant hairpin-loop position in a hypothetical secondary structure of the RNA. This could explain the persistence of a particular 17 nucleotide sequence for 40 years in nature in this highly variable region of the poliovirus genome.
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Pöyry et al. (1989) studied this question.
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