Ah. Lund et al., MUTATED PRIMER BINDING-SITES INTERACTING WITH DIFFERENT TRANSFER-RNASALLOW EFFICIENT MURINE LEUKEMIA-VIRUS REPLICATION, Journal of virology, 67(12), 1993, pp. 7125-7130
Two Akv murine leukemia virus-based retroviral vectors with primer bin
ding sites matching tRNA(Gln-1) and tRNA(Lys-3) were constructed. The
transduction efficiency of these mutated vectors was found to be compa
rable to that of a vector carrying the wild-type primer binding site m
atching tRNA(Pro). Polymerase chain reaction amplification and sequenc
e analysis of transduced proviruses confirmed the transfer of vectors
with mutated primer binding sites and further showed that tRNA(Gln-2)
may act efficiently in conjunction with the tRNA(Gln-1) primer binding
site. We conclude that murine leukemia virus can replicate by using v
arious tRNA molecules as primers and propose primer binding site-tRNA
primer interactions to be of major importance for tRNA primer selectio
n. However, efficient primer selection does not require perfect Watson
-Crick base pairing at all 18 positions of the primer binding site.