Viral Modulation of Host Splicing.

The discovery of precursor messenger RNA splicing was made through the study of adenovirus in the 1970s, and since then, the role of splicing in viral infection has been an important area of study. However, most of the work in this area prior to the past decade has focused on the splicing of viral genes. Only recently has there been an explosion of studies investigating how viral infection influences the splicing of host genes and the effect of this regulation on host-viral interplay. This review focuses on this growing interest and understanding of how viruses affect host splicing, the functional consequences of this regulation, and the questions that are motivating ongoing research surrounding host splicing changes during viral infection.