The molecular biology of rotavirus assembly. (360G-Wellcome-092727_Z_10_Z)

In the last two and a half years we have been studying rotaviruses (RV). We have identified potentially important RNA structures controlling aspects of RNA replication and have made the surprising discovery that RV use lipid droplets (LD)as virus factories (viroplasms) within cells. Disruption of LDs with drugs inhibits RV replication. We are planning a coherent series of studies to build on this. We will study the RV/LD interaction in detail with siRNA knockdown of LD components, lipid analysi s and immunoprecipitations to investigate the virus LD interaction further. We will continue seeking and further characterising RNA structures in the RV segments to find and elucidate the functional role of these in RV replication and genome packaging. We will continue our programme of establishing a plasmid only-based reverse genetics system for RV building on the success we have had so far in isolating and expressing individual RNA segments from RV. These latter two studies will allow us to id entify packaging signals for RV genomic segments.