Recombination in enteroviruses is a biphasic replicative process involving the generation of greater-than genome length 'imprecise' intermediates
Abstract
Recombination in enteroviruses provides an evolutionary mechanism for acquiring extensive regions of novel sequence, is suggested to have a role in genotype diversity and is known to have been key to the emergence of novel neuropathogenic variants of poliovirus. Despite the importance of this evolutionary mechanism, the recombination process remains relatively poorly understood. We investigated heterologous recombination using a novel reverse genetic approach that resulted in the isolation of intermediate chimeric intertypic polioviruses bearing genomes with extensive duplicated sequences at the recombination junction. Serial passage of viruses exhibiting such imprecise junctions yielded progeny with increased fitness which had lost the duplicated sequences. Mutations or inhibitors that changed polymerase fidelity or the coalescence of replication complexes markedly altered the yield of recombinants (but did not influence non-replicative recombination) indicating both that the process is replicative and that it may be possible to enhance or reduce recombination-mediated viral evolution if required. We propose that extant recombinants result from a biphasic process in which an initial recombination event is followed by a process of resolution, deleting extraneous sequences and optimizing viral fitness. This process has implications for our wider understanding of 'evolution by duplication' in the positive-strand RNA viruses.
Citation
Lowry , K , Woodman , A , Cook , J & Evans , D J 2014 , ' Recombination in enteroviruses is a biphasic replicative process involving the generation of greater-than genome length 'imprecise' intermediates ' , PLoS Pathogens , vol. 10 , no. 6 , e1004191 . https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.ppat.1004191
Publication
PLoS Pathogens
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
1553-7366Type
Journal article
Rights
Copyright: © 2014 Lowry et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Description
KL was funded by a University of Warwick postgraduate studentship. AW was funded by a postgraduate studentship from the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (http://www.bbsrc.ac.uk/). DJE acknowledges continuing support from the Medical research Council (http://www.mrc.ac.uk/) on grants #G0401584 and #G1100139.Collections
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