Gammaretrovirus core encapsidation signal

The Gammaretrovirus core encapsidation signal is an RNA element known to be essential for stable dimerisation and efficient genome packaging during virus assembly.

[1] Dimerisation of the viral RNA genomes is proposed to act as an RNA conformational switch which exposes conserved UCUG elements and enables efficient genome encapsidation.

[2] The structure of this element is composed of three stem-loops.

Two of the stem-loops called SL-C and SL-D form a single co-axial extend helix.

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A 3D representation of a Gammaretrovirus core encapsidation signal. This is a view of the NMR structure for the 101-nucleotide core encapsidation signal of the Moloney murine leukemia virus. [ 1 ]
A 3D representation of a Gammaretrovirus. This structure shows the packaging of the dimeric genome of Moloney murine leukaemia virus, of which the encapsidation signal forms a part. [ 2 ]