Ribosome profiling identifies thousands of new viral protein-coding sequences

(Press-News.org) With the help of a technique called Massively Parallel Ribosome Profiling (MPRP), Shira Weingarten-Gabbay and colleagues identified more than 4000 open reading frames (ORFs) across 679 human-associated viral genomes. ORFs are a stretch of genetic material that can encode a protein. Researchers need to know more about viral proteomics to better understand viral effects on the immune system and to develop vaccines. But ORFs are notoriously difficult to detect in viruses using traditional computational methods, and the viruses themselves can be too dangerous to cultivate in a lab for experimental studies. To overcome some of these difficulties, Weingarten-Gabbay et al. created and expressed fragments of viral genomes and combined this with deep sequencing of viral mRNA bound to ribosomes to identify unannotated ORFs across hundreds of viruses associated with humans. Using the method, the researchers were able to identify previously unknown viral peptides that mediate antigen presentation and T cell response, as well as regulate the translation of viral proteins.

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