Building the House of Virus
2nd August 2015
In the hunt for potential RNAi candidate targets, one of the most coveted goals has been the prevention of virus packaging. In the cell, virus particles are made as individual entities and roam around at random until a signal is sent out for the parts to self-assemble into its infectious whole. For 30 years that signal has been known to be contained within the viral RNA. It was first found in herpes and cytomegalovirus, called the alpha sequence. Since then, other genetic elements – known as packaging signals – have been found in other viral families including coronaviruses, hepatitis viruses, and HIV.