Exposing dengue's invasion strategies

Scientists uncover fundamental rules for how dengue virus infects its mosquito and human hosts, providing hope for identifying therapeutic approaches Now, research uncovered surprising strategies for how dengue and hundreds of other viruses replicate in their hosts, with the potential to aid in developing novel antiviral treatments and vaccines.

"During infection, host cells and viral invaders are at war," said Castellano."Like building weapons, both viruses and cells need to build proteins to fight and defend themselves." But just as each synonym is a distinct word, each synonymous codon has individual properties that can impact a cell's efficiency for manufacturing proteins as well as the stability of RNA. In addition, a particular synonymous codon can be efficient and optimal in one species but inefficient and nonoptimal in another. This concept is called codon optimality.

The team analyzed hundreds of other human-infecting viruses and found that many of them, including HIV and SARS-CoV-2, preferentially use less efficient codons relative to humans, suggesting they have evolved an"inefficient" genome as a strategy to use host cell resources in a way that benefits the virus. The conserved preference among viruses has implications to understand not only how viruses evolve but also how the host-pathogen relationship changes over time.

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