Previous Article | Next Article ![]()
Journal of Virology, September 2007, p. 9727-9736, Vol. 81, No. 18
0022-538X/07/$08.00+0 doi:10.1128/JVI.01144-07
Copyright © 2007, American Society for Microbiology. All Rights Reserved.

Raheleh Hatami,1 and
Peter Palese1,2*
Departments of Microbiology,1 Medicine, Mount Sinai School of Medicine, 1 Gustave L. Levy Place, New York, New York 100292
Received 25 May 2007/ Accepted 9 July 2007
A final step in the influenza virus replication cycle is the assembly of the viral structural proteins and the packaging of the eight segments of viral RNA (vRNA) into a fully infectious virion. The process by which the RNA genome is packaged efficiently remains poorly understood. In an approach to analyze how vRNA is packaged, we rescued a seven-segmented virus lacking the hemagglutinin (HA) vRNA (deltaHA virus). This virus could be passaged in cells constitutively expressing HA protein, but it was attenuated in comparison to wild-type A/WSN/33 virus. Supplementing the deltaHA virus with an artificial segment containing green fluorescent protein (GFP) or red fluorescent protein (RFP) with HA packaging regions (45 3' and 80 5' nucleotides) partially restored the growth of this virus to wild-type levels. The absence of the HA vRNA in the deltaHA virus resulted in a 40 to 60% reduction in the packaging of the PA, NP, NA, M, and NS vRNAs, as measured by quantitative PCR (qPCR), and the packaging of these vRNAs was partially restored in the presence of GFP/RFP packaging constructs. To further define nucleotides of the HA coding sequence which are important for vRNA packaging, synonymous mutations were introduced into the full-length HA cDNA of influenza A/WSN/33 and A/Puerto Rico/8/34 viruses, and mutant viruses were rescued. qPCR analysis of vRNAs packaged in these mutant viruses identified a key region of the open reading frame (nucleotides 1659 to 1671) that is critical for the efficient packaging of an influenza virus H1 HA segment.
Published ahead of print on 18 July 2007.
Present address: CSIRO Livestock Industries, CSIRO Australian Animal Health Laboratory, PO Bag 24, Geelong, Victoria 3220, Australia.
This article has been cited by other articles:
Copyright © 2009 by the American Society for Microbiology. For an alternate route to Journals.ASM.org, visit: http://intl-journals.asm.org | More Info»