A sequence of 1425 nt was established that included the complete coat protein (CP) gene of Lettuce big-vein virus (LBVV). The LBVV CP gene encodes a 397 amino acid protein with a predicted M(r) of 44486. Antisera raised against synthetic peptides corresponding to N-terminal or C-terminal parts of the LBVV CP reacted in Western blot analysis with a protein with an M(r) of about 48000. RNA extrac...

The human Protein Kinase R (PKR) is one of the important and critical components of the innate immune response against viral infection. It regulates distinct cellular functions and controls the fate of an RNA molecule in the cell. PKR dephosphorylation is characterised by inhibitory interactions between the kinase domain and the RNA binding domains (RBDs), but the complete structural details an...

Recent research has linked the non-coding intronic regions of plant genes to the production of small RNAs (sRNAs). Certain introns, called 'mirtrons' and 'sirtrons', could serve as the single-stranded RNA precursors for the generation of microRNA and small interfering RNA, respectively. However, whether the intronic regions could serve as the template for double-stranded RNA synthesis and then ...

Canonical processing of miRNA begins in the nucleus with the Microprocessor complex, which is minimally composed of the RNase III enzyme Drosha and two copies of its cofactor protein DGCR8. In structural analogy to most RNase III enzymes, Drosha possesses a modular domain with the double-stranded RNA binding domain (dsRBD) fold. Unlike the dsRBDs found in most members of the RNase III family, t...

The bluetongue virus (BTV) possesses a segmented, double-stranded ribonucleic acid (RNA) genome, a characteristic it shares with other members of the Diplornavirus group (Verwoerd, Louw & Oellermann, 1970; Verwoerd, 1970). These include reovirus, African horsesickness virus (AH SV), wound tumor virus (WTV), rice dwarf virus (RDV), cytoplasmic polyhedrosis virus (CPV) and possibly a number of ot...

Reconstruction of ancestral protein sequences using phylogenetic methods is a powerful technique for directly examining the evolution of molecular function. Although ancestral sequence reconstruction (ASR) is itself very efficient, downstream functional, and structural studies necessary to characterize when and how changes in molecular function occurred are often costly and time-consuming, curr...

RNAi has enabled researchers to study the function of many genes. However, it is not understood why some RNAi experiments succeed while others do not. Here, we show in C. elegans that pharyngeal muscle is resistant to RNAi when initially exposed to double-stranded RNA (dsRNA) by feeding but sensitive to RNAi in the next generation. Investigating this observation, we find that pharyngeal muscle ...

Adenosine deaminases that act on RNA (ADAR) catalyze adenosine to inosine (A-to-I) editing in double-stranded RNA (dsRNA) substrates. Inosine is read as guanosine by the translation machinery; therefore A-to-I editing events in coding sequences may result in recoding genetic information. Whereas vertebrates have two catalytically active enzymes, namely ADAR1 and ADAR2, Drosophila has a single A...

All double-stranded RNA viruses have capsid-associated RNA polymerase activities. In the reoviruses, the transcriptase synthesizes the viral plus strand in a conservative mode and the replicase synthesizes the viral minus strand, again conservatively. In bacteriophage phi 6 and in some fungal viruses, the transcriptase activity is semiconservative, acting by displacement synthesis. In this work...

RNA interference (RNAi) is a post-transcriptional process initiated by double-stranded RNA molecules that degrade a complementary target RNA. In the first step, long double-stranded RNA molecules are chopped into shorter duplexes by an endonuclease dubbed DICER. This work focused on the identification of phosphorylation sites in DICER and proceeded towards comparative modeling. The domain of un...