A PHP Error was encountered

Severity: Warning

Message: file_get_contents(https://...@pubfacts.com&api_key=b8daa3ad693db53b1410957c26c9a51b4908&a=1): Failed to open stream: HTTP request failed! HTTP/1.1 429 Too Many Requests

Filename: helpers/my_audit_helper.php

Line Number: 176

Backtrace:

File: /var/www/html/application/helpers/my_audit_helper.php
Line: 176
Function: file_get_contents

File: /var/www/html/application/helpers/my_audit_helper.php
Line: 250
Function: simplexml_load_file_from_url

File: /var/www/html/application/helpers/my_audit_helper.php
Line: 3122
Function: getPubMedXML

File: /var/www/html/application/controllers/Detail.php
Line: 575
Function: pubMedSearch_Global

File: /var/www/html/application/controllers/Detail.php
Line: 489
Function: pubMedGetRelatedKeyword

File: /var/www/html/index.php
Line: 316
Function: require_once

The role of RNA folding free energy in the evolution of the polymerase genes of the influenza A virus. | LitMetric

The role of RNA folding free energy in the evolution of the polymerase genes of the influenza A virus.

Genome Biol

Department of Computational Biology, School of Medicine, University of Pittsburgh, Fifth Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA 15260, USA.

Published: February 2009

Background: The influenza A virus genome is composed of eight single-stranded RNA segments of negative polarity. Although the hemagglutinin and neuraminidase genes are known to play a key role in host adaptation, the polymerase genes (which encode the polymerase segments PB2, PB1, PA) and the nucleoprotein gene are also important for the efficient propagation of the virus in the host and for its adaptation to new hosts. Current efforts to understand the host-specificity of the virus have largely focused on the amino acid differences between avian and human isolates.

Results: Here we show that the folding free energy of the RNA segments may play an equally important role in the evolution and host adaptation of the influenza virus. Folding free energy may affect the stability of the viral RNA and influence the rate of viral protein translation. We found that there is a clear distinction between the avian and human folding free energy distributions for the polymerase and the nucleoprotein genes, with human viruses having substantially higher folding free energy values. This difference is independent of the amino acid composition and the codon bias. Furthermore, the folding free energy values of the commonly circulating human viruses tend to shift towards higher values over the years, after they entered the human population. Finally, our results indicate that the temperature in which the cells grow affects infection efficiency.

Conclusions: Our data suggest for the first time that RNA structure stability may play an important role in the emergence and host shift of influenza A virus. The fact that cell temperature affects virus propagation in mammalian cells could help identify those avian strains that pose a higher threat to humans.

Download full-text PDF

Source
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2688270PMC
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/gb-2009-10-2-r18DOI Listing

Publication Analysis

Top Keywords

folding free
24
free energy
24
influenza virus
16
host adaptation
12
polymerase genes
8
rna segments
8
amino acid
8
avian human
8
human viruses
8
energy values
8

Similar Publications

Want AI Summaries of new PubMed Abstracts delivered to your In-box?

Enter search terms and have AI summaries delivered each week - change queries or unsubscribe any time!