Paramyxovirus replication and pathogenesis. Reverse genetics transforms understanding.

A recent breakthrough in the field of nonsegmented negative strand RNA viruses (Mononegavirales), including paramyxoviruses, is the establishment of a system to recover an infectious virus entirely from complementary DNA and hence allow reverse genetics. Mutations can now be introduced into viral genomes at will and the resulting phenotypes studied as long as the introduced mutations are not lethal. This technology is being successfully applied to answer outstanding questions regarding the roles of viral components in replication and their contribution to pathogenicity, which are difficult to address using conventional virology. For instance, how the paramyxovirus accessory proteins V and C contribute to actual viral replication and pathogenesis has remained unanswered since their first description more than 20 years ago. Using Sendai virus, which causes fatal pneumonia in mice, it has been shown that the V protein is completely dispensable for viral replication in cell cultures but encodes a luxury function required for pathogenesis in vivo. The Sendai virus C proteins were also defined to be nonessential gene products which greatly contributed to replication both in vitro and in vivo. It is also now possible to design live vaccines by introducing predetermined or plausible attenuating mutations. In addition, the use of paramyxoviruses to express foreign genes has also become feasible. Paramyxovirus reverse genetics is thus renovating our understanding of viral replication and pathogenesis and will further mark an era in recombinant technology for disease prevention and gene therapy.