by Steven Tracy, Nora M Chapman
May 27, 2009
[Note: The full text of this article is available online courtesy of Invest in ME. To access the Spring 2009 issue of the Journal of IiME, go to http://bit.ly/3PvOQ]
Most of what is known about human enteroviruses (HEV) has been derived from the study of the polioviruses, the HEV responsible for poliomyelitis. The HEV are generally not thought to persist for long periods in the host: An acute, sometimes nasty, infection is rapidly eradicated by the host’s serotype-specific adaptive immune response.
Our discovery that the commonly encountered HEV, the group B coxsackieviruses (CVB), can naturally delete sequence from the 5’ end of the RNA genome and that this deletional mechanism results in long-term viral persistence, in the face of the adaptive immune response, has substantially altered this view.
This previously unknown and unsuspected aspect of enterovirus replication provides an explanation for previous reports of enteroviral RNA detected in diseased tissue in the apparent absence of infectious virus particles.
Source: Journal of IiME (Invest in ME), Spring 2009, pp. 23-31. By Tracy S, Chapman NM. Enterovirus Research Laboratory, Department of Pathology and Microbiology, University of Nebraska Medical Center, Omaha, Nebraska, USA. [Email:
stracy@unmc.edu and nchapman@unmc.edu]
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