VITN Blog Post #2: New Technique Provides Insight into how RNA Viruses Interact with our Cells

Researchers at Cambridge University were recently able to develop a method to better understand how Zika virus RNA is able to infect human cells. What’s more exciting about this discovery, is that the researchers say their method, called COMRADES (Crosslink of Matched RNAs and Deep Sequencing), is universally applicable to all RNA viruses in any host cell. When an RNA virus infiltrates a cell, viral replication usually takes place in the cytoplasm of the infected cell. Strands of human RNA float around in the cytoplasm and when human RNA runs into viral RNA, the two molecules can undergo RNA base pairing where their complementary base pairs can bind to each other - Uracil to Adenine, and Cytosine to Guanine. This essentially has the effect of “zipping” the two molecules together.

Prior to this research, little was known about the specificity of this process and the details on how and where on the RNA strands this occurs. COMRADES gives scientists the ability to better understand this process and opens the door for development of methods to interfere with this part of the infection process. Using COMRADES, the positioning and identity of every base pair involved in this zipping can be determined.  

RNA viruses are thought to be highly dangerous specifically because of their extremely high mutability rates. The tool utilized by most RNA viruses for replication, RNA dependent RNA polymerase, has no system for proofreading newly transcribed strands of RNA. If there is one type of virus that might be able to trigger a world-wide pandemic, it is likely a strain that hasn’t yet evolved but eventually will evolve from an RNA virus. COMRADES takes us another step closer to understanding these fascinating microbes and another step closer to preventing such a pandemic.

News Article: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/09/180910111255.htm

Source Article: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41592-018-0121-0

- Renata Starbird