Strategies for viral RNA stability: live long and prosper

Dickson, Alexa M.; Wilusz, Jeffrey

Eukaryotic cells have a powerful RNA decay machinery that plays important and diverse roles in regulating both the quantity and quality of gene expression. Viral RNAs need to successfully navigate around this cellular machinery in order to initiate and maintain a highly productive infection. Recent work shows that viruses have developed a variety of strategies to accomplish this, including inherent RNA shields, hijacking host RNA stability factors, incapacitating the host decay machinery, and by changing the entire landscape of RNA stability in cells using virally-encoded nucleases. In addition to maintaining the stability of viral transcripts, these strategies can also contribute to the regulation and complexity of viral gene expression, as well as viral RNA evolution.