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Influenza

An RNA-synthesizing machine

Nature volume 516, pages 338–339 (2014)Cite this article

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Crystal structures of the complete RNA polymerases from influenza A and B viruses provide insight into how these enzymes initiate RNA synthesis, and reveal targets for antiviral drug design. See Articles p.355 & p.361

Influenza A and B viruses cause a highly contagious disease in humans that results in approximately 250,000 to 500,000 deaths worldwide each year1. In addition, influenza A viruses are responsible for periodic human pandemics that can have substantially higher mortality rates; the most severe pandemic, in 1918, caused around 40 million deaths2. The primary defence against influenza infections has been vaccination, but antiviral drugs also play a key part, for example in the elderly, who are not well protected by vaccines. Circulating influenza viruses have developed resistance to several of the available antivirals3,4, highlighting the need to develop new drugs. The viral RNA polymerase — the enzyme that catalyses the synthesis of virus-specific RNAs in infected cells — is an attractive target for antiviral drug development, but progress has been hampered by the absence of a three-dimensional structure of the enzyme. Two papers from the Cusack research group published in this issue (Pflug et al.5 on page 355 and Reich et al.6 on page 361) now report the first structures of the viral polymerases of influenza A and B, respectively.

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Figure 1: RNA transcription by influenza polymerase.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Robert M. Krug is in the Department of Molecular Biosciences, Center for Infectious Disease, Institute of Cellular and Molecular Biology, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas 78712, USA.,

    Robert M. Krug

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  1. Robert M. Krug
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Correspondence to Robert M. Krug.

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Krug, R. An RNA-synthesizing machine. Nature 516, 338–339 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1038/516338a

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