White tail disease (WTD) kills prawn larvae and causes drastic losses to the freshwater prawn (Macrobrachium rosenbergii) industry. The main causative agent of WTD is Macrobrachium rosenbergii nodavirus (MrNV). The N-terminal end of the MrNV capsid protein is very rich in positively charged amino acids and is postulated to interact with RNA molecules. N-terminal and internal deletion mutagenesis revealed that the RNA-binding region is located at positions 20-29, where 80% of amino acids are positively charged. Substitution of all these positively charged residues with alanine abolished the RNA binding. Mutants without the RNA-binding region still assembled into virus-like particles, suggesting that this region is not a part of the capsid assembly domain. This paper is, to the best of our knowledge, the first to report the specific RNA-binding region of MrNV capsid protein. © 2014 The Authors.
CITATION STYLE
Goh, Z. H., Syakirin Mohd, N. A., Tan, S. G., Bhassu, S., & Tan, W. S. (2014). RNA-binding region of Macrobrachium rosenbergii nodavirus capsid protein. Journal of General Virology, 95(PART 9), 1919–1928. https://doi.org/10.1099/vir.0.064014-0
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