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Is coronavirus RNA infectious? 

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I speculate that SARS-CoV-2 RNAs are infectious based on the following rationale and offer a putative mechanism: RNA is the most important biomolecule of the novel coronavirus for expression and replication, free RNA strands of SARS-CoV-2 have the potential to remain suspended in the air and retain their biological activity, and some exogenous RNAs can enter the host cell after contact.
RNA viruses may be particularly capable of contributing to the increasing biomedical problem of infectious disease emergence.
Overall, we present evidence that subgenomic RNAs may not be an indicator of active coronavirus replication/infection, but that these RNAs, similar to the virus genome RNA, may be rather stable, and thus detectable for an extended period, most likely due to their close association with cellular membranes.
Our results provide a unifying model of the CoV RO and clearly establish DMVs as the central hub for viral RNA synthesis and a potential drug target in coronavirus infection.
Open accessJournal ArticleDOI
David A. Brian, D. E. Dennis, James S. Guy 
53 Citations
This coronavirus can therefore be characterized as a positive-strand RNA virus.
These findings, together with the observation that IBV virions do not exhibit detectable transcriptase activity, support the conclusion that the genome of this coronavirus acts directly as a messenger RNA in eukaryotic cells.
Therefore, the previously proposed hypothesis that coronavirus, subgenomic RNA synthesis may inhibit the replication of genomic RNA by competing for a limited amount of virus-derived factors seems unlikely.
Because coronavirus contains the longest viral RNA genome by far (and is probably one of the longest stable RNAs in nature), this approach seems to pave the way for the reverse genetics studies for all RNA viruses.
Like many other RNA viruses, coronavirus may subvert these cellular proteins from cellular RNA processing or translation machineries to play a role in viral replication.
We find that highly stable RNA structures are pervasive throughout coronavirus genomes, and are conserved between the SARS-like CoV.

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