%A Lin,Wenzhong %A Qiu,Ping %A Jin,Jing %A Liu,Shunmin %A Ul Islam,Saif %A Yang,Jinguang %A Zhang,Jie %A Kormelink,Richard %A Du,Zhenguo %A Wu,Zujian %D 2017 %J Frontiers in Microbiology %C %F %G English %K Cap snatching,sNSV,TSS,Tenuivirus,Geminiviruses %Q %R 10.3389/fmicb.2017.02519 %W %L %M %P %7 %8 2017-December-14 %9 Methods %+ Zhenguo Du,Fujian Province Key Laboratory of Plant Virology, Plant Protection College, Fujian Agriculture and Forestry University,China,duzhenguo1228@163.com %+ Zhenguo Du,State Key Laboratory of Ecological Pest Control for Fujian and Taiwan Crops,China,duzhenguo1228@163.com %+ Zujian Wu,Fujian Province Key Laboratory of Plant Virology, Plant Protection College, Fujian Agriculture and Forestry University,China,wuzujian@126.com %+ Zujian Wu,State Key Laboratory of Ecological Pest Control for Fujian and Taiwan Crops,China,wuzujian@126.com %# %! TSS mapping with cap-snatching %* %< %T The Cap Snatching of Segmented Negative Sense RNA Viruses as a Tool to Map the Transcription Start Sites of Heterologous Co-infecting Viruses %U https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmicb.2017.02519 %V 8 %0 JOURNAL ARTICLE %@ 1664-302X %X Identification of the transcription start sites (TSSs) of a virus is of great importance to understand and dissect the mechanism of viral genome transcription but this often requires costly and laborious experiments. Many segmented negative-sense RNA viruses (sNSVs) cleave capped leader sequences from a large variety of mRNAs and use these cleaved leaders as primers for transcription in a conserved process called cap snatching. The recent developments in high-throughput sequencing have made it possible to determine most, if not all, of the capped RNAs snatched by a sNSV. Here, we show that rice stripe tenuivirus (RSV), a plant-infecting sNSV, co-infects Nicotiana benthamiana with two different begomoviruses and snatches capped leader sequences from their mRNAs. By determining the 5′ termini of a single RSV mRNA with high-throughput sequencing, the 5′ ends of almost all the mRNAs of the co-infecting begomoviruses could be identified and mapped on their genomes. The findings in this study provide support for the using of the cap snatching of sNSVs as a tool to map viral TSSs.