Determinants in the 5' noncoding region of poliovirus Sabin 1 RNA that influence the attenuation phenotype

A number of recombinants between the virulent Mahoney and attenuated Sabin strains of type 1 poliovirus were constructed by using infectious cDNA clones of the two strains. To identify a strong neurovirulence determinant(s) residing in the genome region upstream of nucleotide position 1122, these recombinant viruses were subjected to biological tests, including monkey neurovirulence tests. The results of the monkey neurovirulence tests suggested the important contribution of an adenine residue (Mahoney type) at position 480 to the expression of the neurovirulence phenotype of type 1 poliovirus. This nucleotide, however, had only a minor effect, if any, on viral temperature sensitivity. Monkey neurovirulence tests on the recombinant virus whose genome had a guanine residue (Sabin type) at position 480 and variants generated from this recombinant virus in the central nervous system of monkeys strongly suggested that only one nucleotide change, from adenine to guanine, was not sufficient for full expression of the attenuation phenotype encoded by this genome region. These results suggest that the expression of the attenuation phenotype depends on the highly ordered structure formed in the 5' noncoding sequence and that the formation of such a structure is possibly influenced by the nucleotide at position 480. Furthermore, in vitro biological tests performed on viruses recovered from the central nervous system of monkeys injected with a temperature-sensitive recombinant virus showing the small-plaque and d phenotypes revealed that most of the recovered viruses had even higher temperature sensitivities and that all of the recovered viruses that had acquired the large-plaque phenotype had lost the d phenotype to some extent. These results indicate that there may be an unknown selection pressure(s) in the central nervous system and that common determinants might be involved in the expression of the small-plaque and d phenotypes.