Gammaretrovirus core encapsidation signal

The Gammaretrovirus core encapsidation signal is an RNA element known to be essential for stable dimerisation and efficient genome packaging during virus assembly.^[1] Dimerisation of the viral RNA genomes is proposed to act as an RNA conformational switch which exposes conserved UCUG elements and enables efficient genome encapsidation.^[2] The structure of this element is composed of three stem-loops. Two of the stem-loops called SL-C and SL-D form a single co-axial extend helix.

Gammaretrovirus core encapsidation signal
Predicted secondary structure and sequence conservation of Gammaretro_CES
Identifiers
Symbol	Gammaretro_CES
Rfam	RF00374
Other data
RNA type	Cis-reg
Domain(s)	Eukaryota; Viruses
SO	SO:0000233
PDB structures	PDBe

A 3D representation of a Gammaretrovirus core encapsidation signal. This is a view of the NMR structure for the 101-nucleotide core encapsidation signal of the Moloney murine leukemia virus.^[1]

A 3D representation of a Gammaretrovirus. This structure shows the packaging of the dimeric genome of Moloney murine leukaemia virus, of which the encapsidation signal forms a part.^[2]

See also

• Bacteriophage pRNA