In:
mBio, American Society for Microbiology
Kurzfassung:
The group of viruses termed flaviviruses cause important disease throughout the world and include dengue virus, Zika virus, Japanese encephalitis virus, and many more. All of these flaviviruses have highly conserved RNA structures in the untranslated regions of the virus genome. One of the shared RNA structures, termed the dumbbell region, is not well studied, but mutations in this region are important for vaccine development. In this study, we made structure-informed targeted mutations in the Zika virus dumbbell region and studied the effect on the virus. We found that Zika virus dumbbell mutants are significantly weakened or attenuated due to a decreased ability to produce non-coding RNA that is needed to support infection, support virus-induced cell death, and support escape from the host immune system. These data show that targeted mutations in the flavivirus dumbbell RNA structure may be an important approach to develop future vaccine candidates.
Materialart:
Online-Ressource
ISSN:
2150-7511
DOI:
10.1128/mbio.01108-23
Sprache:
Englisch
Verlag:
American Society for Microbiology
Publikationsdatum:
2023
ZDB Id:
2557172-2
