Dr Venugopal Nair

1. IntroductionNewcastle disease (ND) is a highly contagious avian disease with a significant impact on global poultry production. ND is caused by the Newcastle disease virus (NDV), formerly known as Avian orthoavulavirus 1 (AOAV-1), belonging to the family Paramyxoviridae (https://talk.ictvonline.org/taxonomy/ accessed on 20 October 2021). The genome of NDV is single-stranded, non-segmented, nega ...

IntroductionAll known viruses share an absolute requirement for host cell ribosomes and are exquisitely dependent on cellular translation factors to meet their synthetic needs. Faced with this dependency, viruses have evolved strategies to commandeer the host translational apparatus [1, 2]. Studies of viral subversion of host protein synthesis machinery have not only revealed key steps in viral pa ...

Introduction Cytosines within the genome not only constitute part of the genetic code but are also amenable to chemical modification making them a central conveyer of epigenetic information. Methylation of the fifth position of cytosine (5-methylcytosine, 5mC) is an evolutionarily conserved epigenetic modification [1] which helps to maintain genome stability and acts as a suppressive mark for gene ...

 1. IntroductionMicroRNAs (miRNAs) are ~22-nucleotide small RNA molecules that profoundly affect gene expression by directing repressive protein complexes to the untranslated region (UTR) of target messenger RNA (mRNA) transcripts. Since its first discovery in C. elegans [1], identification of miRNAs, some of which are evolutionarily conserved [2–4], has continued at a fast pace. Today, ...

To date, the vast majority of known virus-encoded microRNAs (miRNAs) are derived from polymerase II transcripts encoded by DNA viruses. A recent demonstration that the bovine leukemia virus, a retrovirus, uses RNA polymerase III to directly transcribe the pre-miRNA hairpins to generate viral miRNAs further supports the common notion that the canonical pathway of miRNA biogenesis does not exist com ...

T-lymphocytes are central targets of Marek’s disease, a major chicken disease induced by the oncogenic alphaherpesvirus Marek’s disease virus (MDV). T-lymphocyte infection is also associated with immunosuppression and virus latency. To decipher viral morphogenesis in T-lymphocytes, we used the recombinant vRB-1B 47EGFP marker virus to generate a new lymphoblastoid cell line, 3867K, tha ...