Virology lecture: Picornaviruses

I was scheduled to deliver a lecture on picornaviruses to a virology class at Yale University this week, but had to cancel at the last minute. I prepared this screencast to make up for my absence.

The Picornaviridae is a family of non-enveloped, positive-strand RNA viruses which contains some well known viruses including poliovirus, rhinovirus, hepatitis A virus, enterovirus 71, and foot-and-mouth disease virus. In this lecture I cover basic aspects of picornavirus replication and pathogenesis, including attachment and entry, translation and protein processing, RNA synthesis, assembly and release, disease and immunization.

3 thoughts on “Virology lecture: Picornaviruses”

  1. Thank you for posting this very informative and nice lecture with these beautiful illustrations!

    I find it amazing how much is known about these viruses, how they enter the cell, and so on – and that there are still so details which need figuring out. Surely an interesting and worthwhile area of research.

    Alas, I fear it won’t aid me personally much in figuring out how viruses cause what pathology, how the human immune system reacts, and so on. And especially in trying to find out whether the reported connection between Enteroviruses and my illness (ME/CFS) is spurious (which I suspect), or an lead that needs following up.

    Still, I think it is important (even for laymen) to have such a foundation as you offer here.

  2. Thank you very much for all the information and great lectures!
    I have a question concerning adults and polio: What is the reason that more children get infected with polio (beside the reason of their weaker immune system) or is this also true for adults that are not vaccinated???
    Thank you!!

  3. I am confused about the uridylylation of Vpg protein. All of the textbooks say that it is uridylylated on cre sequence before priming the synthesis of negative strand (and that’s what Vincent said in this lecture). However, it seems that published research states that Vpg uridylylated from cre sequence is only needed for positive strand synthesis (were it binds 3’AA sequence) but for negative strand synthesis Vpg is uridylylated only from the polyA of the 3’end. Here’s the link to one such research but it seems to have been cited quite a lot http://jvi.asm.org/content/77/9/5136.full . Would be very grateful if someone could confirm/deny that this mechanism now an accepted one. I know textbooks take time to be updated but it seems that not one have yet done that… Thanks in advance 🙂

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