Form confers function: Case of the 3’X region of the hepatitis C virus genome

Figure 1 Secondary structure model of the 3'UTR of hepatitis C virus genome with adjacent 3' terminal sequence of the coding region. The stop codon is indicated by a gray ellipse. The regions involved in the kissing-interactions are marked with blue lines; the region involved in dimerization is indicated by a red line; the seed region for miR122 is highlighted in bold.

Figure 2 Diverse secondary structure models proposed for the 3'X region of hepatitis C virus genome. A: The 3xSL model[17,18]; B: The 4xSL model[20]; C: The 2xSL model[21]. The region involved in the kissing-interactions is indicated with blue line, the region involved in dimerization is marked with red line; possible alternative folding of separate fragments are displayed as gray rectangles.

Figure 3 Long-range RNA-RNA interactions proposed for the 3'X region of hepatitis C virus genome. A: The homodimeric interactions between two 3'X regions embedded into two RNA molecules, model according to Cantero-Camacho et al[24]; B: The kissing-interactions with SL5B3.2[22,28,31,33]. Nucleotide sequence involved in dimerization is additionally indicated with red line, while those involved in the kissing-interactions are marked with blue lines.