Describes a novel mechanism of viral RNA recombination ('primer alignment-and-extension') that explains the high rate of recombination of RNA viruses in natural conditions.
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Reveals mechanism potentially explaining natural RNA virus recombination rates; leaves open its prevalence and in vivo relevance.
In the course of experiments designed to assess the potential role of alternative open reading frames (ORF) present in the 5'-terminal untranslated region (5'-UTR) of poliovirus type 1 (Mahoney strain) genomic RNA, we came across a double mutation that completely abrogated the infectivity of full-length cDNA clones. The infectivity was rescued in trans by cotransfecting COS-1 cells with short RNA transcripts of the wild-type 5'-UTR of poliovirus type 2 Lansing, provided a free 3'-OH was available. Direct sequencing of the viral RNA revealed that the infectious viruses recovered were recombinants Lansing/Mahoney, with variable points of 'crossing-over'. A novel mechanism of RNA-RNA recombination, which we propose to call 'primer alignment-and-extension', is described that would explain the high rate of recombination of RNA viruses observed in natural conditions.
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Pierangeli et al. (1999) studied this question.
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