GSE65101
Sequencing the cap-snatching repertoire of H1N1 influenza provides insight into the mechanism of viral transcription initiation
The influenza polymerase cleaves host RNAs ~10–13 nucleotides downstream of their 5' ends and uses this capped fragment to prime viral mRNA synthesis. To better understand this process of cap snatching, we used high-throughput sequencing to determine the 5' ends of A/WSN/33 (H1N1) influenza mRNAs. The sequences provided clear evidence for nascent-chain realignment during transcription initiation and revealed a strong influence of the viral template on the frequency of realignment. After accounting for the extra nucleotides inserted through realignment, analysis of the capped fragments indicated that the different viral mRNAs were each prepended with a common set of sequences and that the polymerase often cleaved host RNAs after a purine and often primed transcription on a single base pair to either the terminal or penultimate residue of the viral template. We also developed a bioinformatic approach to identify the targeted host transcripts despite limited information content within snatched fragments and found that small nuclear RNAs and small nucleolar RNAs contributed the most abundant capped leaders. These results provide insight into the mechanism of viral transcription initiation and reveal the diversity of the cap-snatched repertoire, showing that noncoding transcripts as well as mRNAs are used to make influenza mRNAs. Overall design: Sixteen datasets were generated, corresponding to template-switching 5’-RACE libraries of 1) each viral RNA, 2) a time-course of NS1 viral RNA, or 3) CIP-TAP libraries of NS1 and PB2. Libraries contain random barcodes of length 5 (NS1_TS, PB2_TS, NS1_5R, PB2_5R) or 9 (other datasets) at the start of each read, and at least three guanosine residues for the template-switching datasets. See methods of accompanying paper for further details. Samples were sequenced on an Illumina HiSeq 2000.