Dengue virus NS3 chimeric analysis

Enzyme activities for replicating DENV 5 prime cap positive sense RNA have been shown to reside in NS3 and NS5. However, it remains unknown how these enzymes coordinately and repeatedly synthesize the 5 prime cap positive sense RNA via the negative sense RNA. We previously revealed that NS5 dimerization and NS5MT-NS3HEL interaction are important for the DENV RNA replication. Here, we found that the replacement of NS3PRO or HEL was compensated by the mutation at HEL or NS2B, respectively. Amino acid mutations were also induced in NS5 as well as other membrane integral proteins; NS2A, 4A, and 4B with various frequencies.