Nicolas Calderon Kevin, Fabian Galindo Johan, Bermudez-Santana Clara Isabel
Departamento de Biología, Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Bogotá 111321, Colombia.
Departamento de Química, Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Bogotá 111321, Colombia.
Life (Basel). 2021 Apr 14;11(4):344. doi: 10.3390/life11040344.
Zika virus (ZIKV), without a vaccine or an effective treatment approved to date, has globally spread in the last century. The infection caused by ZIKV in humans has changed progressively from mild to subclinical in recent years, causing epidemics with greater infectivity, tropism towards new tissues and other related symptoms as a product of various emergent ZIKV-host cell interactions. However, it is still unknown why or how the RNA genome structure impacts those interactions in differential evolutionary origin strains. Moreover, the genomic comparison of ZIKV strains from the sequence-based phylogenetic analysis is well known, but differences from RNA structure comparisons have barely been studied. Thus, in order to understand the RNA genome variability of lineages of various geographic distributions better, 410 complete genomes in a phylogenomic scanning were used to study the conservation of structured RNAs. Our results show the contemporary landscape of conserved structured regions with unique conserved structured regions in clades or in lineages within circulating ZIKV strains. We propose these structures as candidates for further experimental validation to establish their potential role in vital functions of the viral cycle of ZIKV and their possible associations with the singularities of different outbreaks that lead to ZIKV populations to acquire nucleotide substitutions, which is evidence of the local structure genome differentiation.
寨卡病毒（ZIKV），迄今尚无获批的疫苗或有效治疗方法，在上个世纪已在全球传播。近年来，ZIKV在人类中引起的感染已逐渐从轻度转变为亚临床感染，由于各种新出现的ZIKV-宿主细胞相互作用，导致传染性更强、对新组织具有嗜性以及出现其他相关症状的疫情。然而，RNA基因组结构为何以及如何影响不同进化起源菌株中的这些相互作用仍不清楚。此外，可以通过基于序列的系统发育分析对ZIKV菌株进行基因组比较，但对RNA结构比较的差异研究甚少。因此，为了更好地了解不同地理分布谱系的RNA基因组变异性，在系统发育基因组扫描中使用了410个完整基因组来研究结构化RNA的保守性。我们的结果显示了保守结构区域的当代格局，在流行的ZIKV菌株的进化枝或谱系中具有独特的保守结构区域。我们提出将这些结构作为进一步实验验证的候选对象，以确定它们在ZIKV病毒周期重要功能中的潜在作用，以及它们与不同疫情特点的可能关联，这些疫情导致ZIKV群体获得核苷酸替换，这是局部结构基因组分化的证据。
