Research catches double-stranded RNA virus in the act of transcription

In separate studies published in the peer-reviewed journals eLife and Nature, scientists at the California NanoSystems Institute at UCLA have revealed the three-dimensional atomic structure of a double-stranded RNA, or dsRNA, virus. The research demonstrates for the first time how viruses sense environmental conditions inside a host cell to trigger transcription, and presents key findings about how the dsRNA genome is organized inside the virus and RNA's mechanism for self-replication.