Abstract
Insects are a group of arthropods and the largest group of animals on Earth, with over one million species described to date. Like other life forms, insects suffer from viruses that cause disease and death. Viruses that are pathogenic to beneficial insects cause dramatic economic losses on agriculture. In contrast, viruses that are pathogenic to insect pests can be exploited as attractive biological control agents. All of these factors have led to an explosion in the amount of research into insect viruses in recent years, generating impressive quantities of information on the molecular and cellular biology of these viruses. Due to the wide variety of insect viruses, a better understanding of these viruses will expand our overall knowledge of their virology. Here, we review studies of several newly discovered RNA insect viruses in China.
Highlights
From the view of biology, insects are the hosts of insect virus
This review focuses on several newly discovered positive-strand RNA viruses isolated from insects in China, including nodavirus, a well-recognized model for studying RNA virus replication [1,2,3,4,5,6,7], tetravirus, a good model for studying the molecular driving forces for the evolution of positive-strand RNA viruses [8,9,10], and picorna-like virus, an ideal model for studying the molecular mechanism of important human pathogens as there is no concerns for its biological safety [11–17]
RNA1 contains an open reading frame (ORF) for the synthesis of protein A, which serves as the RNA-dependent RNA polymerase (RdRp) for the amplification of both genomic strands, as well as a subgenomic RNA
Summary
Wuhan Nodavirus (WhNV) is the first reported nodavirus isolated from insects in China [5]. Nodaviruses have gained increasing attention in the scientific community as ideal model organisms for RNA virology and as vehicles for foreign protein presentation [27] These nodavirus applications are mainly due to their following distinct features: (i) they share a simple genomic organization and replicate in a wide variety of cells [28,29]; (ii) they serve as valuable model systems to study the innate immunity of insects, the induction and suppression of RNA silencing [30–37]; and (iii) they can be used as epitope presentation systems for the development of novel anthrax antitoxins and vaccines [38–41]. Due to these important features, a better understanding of the core steps of the nodaviral life cycle, such as replication and survival, is highly desired
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