Are picobirnaviruses actually RNA bacteriophage rather than eukaryotic viruses? – Blog Archive – Elsevier

After extensive discussions in the lab about the possible links between picobirnaviruses and disease, on a mid-July Friday afternoon, Dave off-handedly suggested to Sidd that picobirnaviruses might infect bacteria. Having recently completed a project on the diversity of RNA bacteriophages, Sidd was intrigued by this hypothesis, as there are only two known families of RNA bacteriophages. He thought about what genomic information could be leveraged to discern whether picobirnaviruses infect bacteria and remembered that bacterial RNA viruses often encode a conserved nucleotide sequence upstream of their genes to initiated translation, called the ribosomal binding site (RBS) or Shine-Dalgarno sequence. As eukaryotes do not use this sequence to initiate translation, he surmised that if picobirnaviruses conserved the RBS sequence, it might suggest that they infect bacteria. So, he downloaded the genome sequences of Human Picobirnavirus and found RBS sequences in front of its 3 genes. He then checked all the other deposited picobirnavirus genomes within the database, as well as the 38  novel picobirnavirus genomes; shockingly, they all conserved RBS sequences. Sidd computationally analyzed genes from all other DNA and RNA viruses that infect bacteria or eukaryotes and confirmed that only bacterial viruses consistently conserve the RBS sequence.See it on Scoop.it, via Viruses, Immunology & Bioinformatics from Virology.uvic.ca
Are picobirnaviruses actually RNA bacteriophage rather than eukaryotic viruses? – Blog Archive – Elsevier
Source: Viral Bioinformatics