RNA structure plays a fundamental role in internal initiation of translation. Picornavirus internal ribosome entry site (IRES) are long, efficient cis-acting elements that recruit the ribosome to internal mRNA sites. However, little is known about long-range constraints determining the IRES RNA structure. Here, we sought to investigate the functional and structural relevance of the invariant ap...

Wild animals are considered reservoirs for emerging and reemerging viruses, such as the novel severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). Previous studies have reported that bats ticks harbored variable important pathogenic some of which could cause potential diseases in humans livestock, while viruses carried by reptiles were rarely reported. Our study first conducted snakes’...

Abstract Picornaviridae are a family of small positive-strand RNA viruses, and transmitted via the respiratory or fecal-oral route. The neurotropic picornaviruses can induce acute late recurrent seizures following central nervous system infection, by infecting peripheral nerve, crossing blood-brain barrier migrating in Trojan-horse method. Theiler’s murine encephalomyelitis virus (TMEV), as mem...

The genome of the prototype stain of coxsackievirus B4 (J.V.B. Benschoten) has been cloned in Escherichia coli and its complete nucleotide sequence determined. Excluding the poly(A) tract, the RNA genome is 7395 nucleotides in length and appears to encode a single polyprotein of 2183 amino acids. The predicted amino acid sequence of the polyprotein shows close homology (88%) to that of the prev...

Using Vero cells, we isolated a virus (NII561-2000) from a cerebrospinal fluid specimen of a 1-year-old girl with Reye syndrome. The determined amino acid sequence of the virus indicated that the isolate was a human parechovirus (HPeV), a member of Picornaviridae. Neutralization test showed that the NII561-2000 virus had distinct antigenicity to HPeV-1, HPeV-2, and HPeV-3, and that the sequence...

Hepatitis A virus (HAV), the causative agent of type A viral hepatitis, is an ancient human virus that was first identified almost 35 years ago. It has several characteristics that make it unique among the Picornaviridae, particularly in terms of its mechanisms of polyprotein processing and virion morphogenesis, and which likely contribute to its pathobiology. Although efficacious vaccines cont...