Targeting the m<sup>6</sup>A RNA modification pathway blocks SARS-CoV-2 and HCoV-OC43 replication
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
N 6 -methyladenosine (m 6 A) is an abundant internal RNA modification, influencing transcript fate and function in uninfected and virus-infected cells. Installation of m 6 A by the nuclear RNA methyltransferase METTL3 occurs cotranscriptionally; however, the genomes of some cytoplasmic RNA viruses are also m 6 A-modified. How the cellular m 6 A modification machinery impacts coronavirus replication, which occurs exclusively in the cytoplasm, is unknown. Here we show that replication of SARS-CoV-2, the agent responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic, and a seasonal human β-coronavirus HCoV-OC43, can be suppressed by depletion of METTL3 or cytoplasmic m 6 A reader proteins YTHDF1 and YTHDF3 and by a highly specific small molecule METTL3 inhibitor. Reduction of infectious titer correlates with decreased synthesis of viral RNAs and the essential nucleocapsid (N) protein. Sites of m 6 A modification on genomic and subgenomic RNAs of both viruses were mapped by methylated RNA immunoprecipitation sequencing (meRIP-seq). Levels of host factors involved in m 6 A installation, removal, and recognition were unchanged by HCoV-OC43 infection; however, nuclear localization of METTL3 and cytoplasmic m 6 A readers YTHDF1 and YTHDF2 increased. This establishes that coronavirus RNAs are m 6 A-modified and host m 6 A pathway components control β-coronavirus replication. Moreover, it illustrates the therapeutic potential of targeting the m 6 A pathway to restrict coronavirus reproduction.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it