Effect of ribozymes cleaving conserved and coding region of rice stripe virus RNA
Abstract: Rice stripe virus(RSV)genome is composed of four ssRNA species. The 5'-and 3'-terminal sequences of about 20 bases of each ssRNA were almost completely complementary to each otherand the 5'-terminal sequences of all four ssRNA have the some sequence of 11 nucleotides.Thoseconserved sequences were proposed to be involved in the replication,transcription or assembly ofRNAs into the particle.If those sequences are cleaved the virus would be lack of recognition sitesso that its reproduction will be destroyed.On the other hand,the diseasespecific protein (DSP)is related to the disease severity. Inhibition of its expression may reduce the disease severity.Basedon those considerations and the structure requirements of the hammer-head ribozymes,two ri-bozymes were designed,one was to cleave the conserved region of the 5'-terminal of the viral se-quence of RNA 4 or even all the regions of the 5'-terminals of the eight viral and viral complemen-tary sequences of the virus,and the another to cleave the DSP gene region.