Drawing on disorder: How viruses use histone mimicry to their advantage

Tarakhovsky, Alexander; Prinjha, Rab K.

At the core of the viral strategy is the ability of viruses to attenuate innate and adaptive immune responses, while coopting the transcriptional and translational machineries of infected cells to generate new viral particles (García-Sastre and Biron, 2006) . This strategy generates a phenotypically new infected cell state that combines the features of the normal host cell with the features that support viral replication and spreading (Nagy and Pogany, 2011) . The strategic aims of the rely on different tactics that reflect differences between viral genomes as well as the nature of the affected cells (García-Sastre, 2017) . In turn, the differences in virus tactics yields phenotypic diversity among infected cells as defined by patterns of gene and protein expression and metabolic states.