4 ms·
Do 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 in
by philsnow 5y ago
Do 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?