Rhabdoviruses

Abstract

Vesicular stomatitis virus (VSV) has long served as paradigm for understanding the strategies of viral genome replication of the non-segmented negative-strand (NNS) RNA viruses or order Mononegavirales. Although the primary focus of this chapter will be to summarize our current knowledge based upon work performed with VSV-Indiana or VSIV it should be emphasized that there are important distinctions between different Rhabdoviridae family members, notably some of the plant viruses exhibit a nuclear phase to their replication cycle. In addition, while the general principles from studying the cis-acting signals and trans-acting factors derived from study of VSIV hold true for other viruses, the nucleotide (nt) sequence of the signals themselves are distinct and the protein-protein interactions may be accomplished by distinct residues.