3 ms·
Viral Knots
- philsnow 5y agoDo the RNAses become irrevocably "stuck" when they try to process the 5' end of one of the pictured zika RNA molecules? It seems so: > These things pile up inside the cell and start disrupting all sorts of other cellular processes in turn (such as the ones that respond to viral attack!) making for a more successful infection. If so, that sounds like a really good way to asymmetrically use up a ton of cell resources, since RNAses are huge (on the order of 10k base pairs) compared to the dinky little "knots" (the one pictured looks to be no more than ~100bp). I have no intuition for how thoroughly stuck they get -- maybe they just keep 'trying' to process the RNA until they degrade?
- alariccole 5y agoThis is incredibly interesting. Not something I had read about before. Literal knots in RNA! It’s like a sabotage (in the etymological sense), a wrench in the gears of protein.