The virology–RNA biology connection
- Department of Molecular Genetics and Microbiology and Center for Virology, Duke University Medical Center, Durham, North Carolina 27710, USA
- Corresponding author: bryan.cullen{at}duke.edu
This extract was created in the absence of an abstract.
My goal in writing this article is to offer my personal reflections on RNA research, focusing on the last 20 years, to be published in a special issue marking the 20th anniversary of RNA, the premier journal in the then-emerging but now well established field of RNA biology. While I have published a number of papers relevant to RNA research, my main focus has always been on virology and I will therefore take this opportunity to remind especially younger readers that RNA research actually initially grew out of virology and that these two subjects continue to be highly interconnected.
Viruses contain small genomes, which can be more readily manipulated than cellular genomes and, in infected cells, viruses often produce very high levels of individual viral transcripts, which can be more readily isolated and characterized than most cellular RNAs. It is therefore not surprising that many of the key post-transcriptional …
