The Courtney GroupMolecular Virology · QUB

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MKRN2 helps move influenza mRNA, published in PLoS Pathogens

By capturing the cellular proteins that bind viral RNA during infection, we uncovered a role for MKRN2 in trafficking influenza mRNA.

Papers

Figure 1 of the MKRN2 study on cellular RNA-binding proteins during influenza infection
Fig. 1 from Bonazza et al., PLoS Pathogens (2024), CC BY 4.0

Viruses carry very few genes of their own, so they rely on the host cell’s RNA-binding proteins to process, move and translate their RNA.

In this paper we developed an approach to identify the cellular RNA-binding proteins that interact with influenza RNA during infection. Among them, the protein MKRN2 turned out to play a role in trafficking influenza mRNA.

Read the paper: Bonazza S, Coutts HL, Sukumar S, Turkington HL, Courtney DG. PLoS Pathogens 20(5): e1012231 (2024).

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