RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Temporal Transcriptome and Promoter Architecture of the African Swine Fever Virus
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 847343
DO 10.1101/847343
A1 Gwenny Cackett
A1 Dorota Matelska
A1 Michal Sýkora
A1 Raquel Portugal
A1 Michal Malecki
A1 Jürg Bähler
A1 Linda Dixon
A1 Finn Werner
YR 2019
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/11/20/847343.abstract
AB The African Swine Fever Virus causes haemorrhagic fever in domestic pigs and presents the biggest global threat to animal farming in recorded history. Despite its importance, very little is known the mechanisms and temporal regulation of transcription in ASFV. Here we report the first detailed viral transcriptome analysis of ASFV during early and late infection of Vero cells. In addition to total RNA sequencing, we have characterised the transcription start sites and transcription termination sites at nucleotide-resolution, revealing the distinct DNA consensus motifs of early and late promoters, as well as the sequence determinants for transcription termination. ASFV can utilise alternative promoters to generate distinct proteins from the same transcription unit that differ with respect to the polypeptide N-terminus. Finally, our results reveal that the ASFV-RNAP undergoes transcript slippage at the 5’ end of transcription units that in a promoter sequence-specific manner results in the addition of 5’-AT and 5’-ATAT tails to mRNAs.