Joanna from Creative Biostructure who offers insightful strategies and cost-effective services on structure determination of macromolecules using X-ray Crystallography, EM, NMR, etc.
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The Lachlan Coin and Sebastian Duchene teams and collaborators in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology, University of Melbourne, Australia, provided the first direct RNA sequence of the SARS-CoV-2, detailed the mRNA structure of the subgenome length of this coronavirus, and described various aspects of coronavirus evolutionary genetics revealed from shared data. The relevant article was released on March 7 on the preprint server bioRxiv (all articles in bioRxiv were not peer-reviewed).
In order for viruses to proliferate, they usually need to be supported by infected cells. In many cases, the molecules they need to replicate their own genetic material are only found in the nucleus of the host cell before infecting other cells in the vicinity. But not all viruses enter the nucleus. Some viruses stay in the cytoplasm and must therefore be able to replicate their genetic material independently. To do so, they must bring their own "machined parts". A key player in this process is a specialized enzyme, RNA polymerase, composed of various subunits. This enzyme reads genetic information from the viral genome and transcribes it into messenger RNA (mRNA) and uses mRNA as a blueprint for proteins encoded in the genome.
