The yellow fever virus capsid protein is a potent suppressor of RNA silencing that binds double stranded RNA.

In this study, we describe a viral suppressor of RNA silencing encoded by the prototype flavivirus, yellow fever virus (YFV). We show that the YFV capsid protein inhibits RNA silencing in the mosquito Aedes aegypti by interfering with Dicer. These results suggest a molecular arms race between vector and pathogen underlies the continued existence of flaviviruses in nature. For the sequencing data we are submitting, we used recombinant Sindbis viruses expressing the yellow fever capsid (2J_YFV_cap) or a the yellow fever capsid sequence with the start codon removed (2J_YFV_cap_ntr). We infected mosquitoes with the recombinant viruses, waited 96hrs and did total RNA extraction from three pools of five mosquitoes each (each pool was a biological replicate, thus each sample being called rep1 -3). Small RNAs (18 to 35-nt) were recovered by PAGE separation, and librarie sprepared with the Truseq small RNA sample prep kit (Illumina) according to the manufacturer's instructions.