Discovery of Varicella zoster virus circular RNA with short read sequencing

Varicella-zoster virus (VZV), an alphaherpesvirus, causes chickenpox (varicella) in young children with an annual minimum of 140 million new cases and herpes zoster in senior, a painful and debilitating disease with 3-5‰ incidence. A complex structural transcriptome of VZV, which numerous novel transcripts, transcript isoforms, and unknown splice events are found during cell infection. Circular RNA (circRNA), a newly important component of the transcriptome, is increasing discoveries of circRNA function in mammalian cells. However, VZV encoded circRNA remains unexplored. In this study we demonstration that VZV derived circRNAs are biologically functional and contributed to viral pathogenesis. Using deep RNA-seq following RNase R treatment, we identified and charactered 35, 076 and 54 human and VZV pOka strain circRNAs respectively from VZV infected neuroblastoma cell (SH-SY5Y). We collected VZV infected human neuroblastoma cell (SH-SY5Y), containing 3 replicates. A deep RNA-seq following RNase R treatment was performed. The code used in this study and extended data are available from the GitHub repository (https://github.com/ShaominYang/VZV_circRNA)