Advances in the Bioinformatics Knowledge of mRNA Polyadenylation in Baculovirus Genes

PEROS, I.G.; CERRUDO, C.S.; PILLOFF, M.G.; BELAICH, M.N.; LOZANO, M.E.; GHIRINGHELLI, P. D.

Viruses

Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute

Lugar: Basel; Año: 2020 vol. 2020 p. 1 - 26

1999-4915

Baculoviruses are a group of insect viruses with large circular dsDNA genomes exploitedin numerous biotechnological applications, such as the biological control of agricultural pests,the expression of recombinant proteins or the gene delivery of therapeutic sequences in mammals,among others. Their genomes encode between 80 and 200 proteins, of which 38 are shared by allreported species. Thanks to multi-omic studies, there is remarkable information about the baculoviralproteome and the temporality in the virus gene expression. This allows some functional elementsof the genome to be very well described, such as promoters and open reading frames. However,less information is available about the transcription termination signals and, consequently, there arestill imprecisions about what are the limits of the transcriptional units present in the baculovirusgenomes and how is the processing of the 30 end of viral mRNA. Regarding to this, in this reviewwe provide an update about the characteristics of DNA signals involved in this process and wecontribute to their correct prediction through an exhaustive analysis that involves bibliographyinformation, data mining, RNA structure and a comprehensive study of the core gene 30 ends from180 baculovirus genomes.