Synergistic Effect between 3′-Terminal Noncoding and Adjacent Coding Regions of the Influenza A Virus Hemagglutinin Segment on Template Preference

Abstract

While most influenza A virus vRNA segments contain segment-specific nonconserved noncoding regions of similar length and sequence, these regions vary considerably both in length and sequence in the segments encoding HA and NA, the two major antigenic determinants of influenza A viruses. In this study, we investigated the function of the 3′-end H1-ssNCR and observed a synergistic effect between the 3′-end H1-ssNCR nucleotides and adjacent coding nucleotide(s) of the HA segment on template preference in a multisegment environment.