Analysis of NS2-dependent effects on influenza PB1 segment extends replication requirements beyond the canonical promoter
Influenza A virus encodes promoters in both the sense and antisense orientations. These support the generation of new genomes, antigenomes, and mRNA transcripts. Characterization of the influenza promoters using minimal replication assays—transfections with viral polymerase, nucleoprotein, and a genomic template—defined their sequence as 13nt at the 5' end of the viral genomic RNA (U13) and 12nt at the 3' end (U12).Other than a single position the U12 and U13 sequences are identical between all eight RNA molecules that comprise the segmented influenza genome.Nevertheless, each segment can exhibit different transcriptional dynamics despite possessing identical promoters.Minimal replication assays lack  the influenza protein NS2, which can modulate transcription and replication differentially between influenza segments.This suggests that NS2 expression may redefine the influenza A virus promoter.In this work we assess how internal regions of sequence in two genomic segments, HA and PB1, may contribute to NS2-dependent replication as well as map such interactions down to individual nucleotides in PB1. We find that the expression of NS2 significantly alters sequence requirements for efficient replication beyond the identical U12 and U13 sequence, providing a mechanism for the divergent replication and transcription dynamics across the influenza A virus genome. Overall design: To understand the contribution of individual positions to NS2-dependent replication, a combination of barcoded, length-variant libraries, and single-nucleotide variant libraries were generated, sequenced, and used in minimal replication assays with and without the additional expression of NS2.