Experimentally guided models reveal replication principles that shape the mutation distribution of RNA viruses.

Life history theory posits that the sequence and timing of events in an organism's lifespan are fine-tuned by evolution to maximize the production of viable offspring. In a virus, a life history strategy is largely manifested in its replication mode. Here, we develop a stochastic mathematical model to infer the replication mode shaping the structure and mutation distribution of a poliovirus population in an intact single infected cell.

Single-cell analysis uncovers extensive biological noise in poliovirus replication.

Unlabelled: Viral infections often begin with a very small number of initiating particles. Accordingly, the outcome of an infection is likely to be affected by variability in the initial molecular interactions between virus and host. In this study, we investigated the range of outcomes upon infection of single cells.

Global RNA structure analysis of poliovirus identifies a conserved RNA structure involved in viral replication and infectivity.

The genomes of RNA viruses often contain RNA structures that are crucial for translation and RNA replication and may play additional, uncharacterized roles during the viral replication cycle. For the picornavirus family member poliovirus, a number of functional RNA structures have been identified, but much of its genome, especially the open reading frame, has remained uncharacterized. We have now generated a global RNA structure map of the poliovirus genome using a chemical probing approach that interrogates RNA structure with single-nucleotide resolution.

Poliovirus: generation and characterization of mutants.

Poliovirus (PV) is the prototypical picornavirus. It is a non-enveloped RNA virus with a small (~7.5-kb) genome of positive polarity.

The dominant inhibitory chalcone synthase allele C2-Idf (inhibitor diffuse) from Zea mays (L.) acts via an endogenous RNA silencing mechanism.

The flavonoid pigment pathway in plants has been used as a model system for studying gene regulatory mechanisms. C2-Idf is a stable dominant mutation of the chalcone synthase gene, c2, which encodes the first dedicated enzyme in this biosynthetic pathway of maize. Homozygous C2-Idf plants show no pigmentation.