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What are segmented viruses?
What are segmented viruses?
Segmented viruses refers to any viruses whose genomes consists of multiple discrete molecules of RNA or DNA. Two important segmented viruses include influenza and rotavirus. These are also the viruses which we focused on for this project.
What is reassortment?
What is reassortment?
Having segmented genomes allows viruses the opportunity to create progeny with greater genetic diversity through the process known as reassortment. Reassortment occurs when multiple related viruses from different lineages co-infect a cell and exchange genes by packaging a mix of each other's genome segments.
What is assortment?
What is assortment?
Related to reassortment, assortment is the process by which a segmented virus packages its genome segments. While the process of reassortment gives segmented viruses an advantage due to its ability to create greater genetic diversity, having segmented genomes adds complexity to the process of genome packaging.
The mechanism behind assortment in influenza and rotavirus is not well understood, and this is the process we hoped to understand in our project!
What do we know?
What do we know?
During the viral packaging process, both influenza and rotavirus are known to form complexes featuring RNA-RNA interactions. In addition, through reverse genetics experiments, the terminal regions of the genome segments have also been identified as being especially important to the process of assortment. In our project, we built off of this knowledge to identify assortment signal sequences in the genomics segments of influenza and rotavirus.
Page by: Maya Parish
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