| Resumo: | Influenza A virus (IAV) is a respiratory virus that causes yearly seasonal epidemics and sporadic pandemic outbreaks. Annually, influenza epidemics result in 1 billion infections, 3–5 million cases of severe disease, and 300,000–500,000 deaths worldwide, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). Viruses are small opportunistic infectious agents that rely on the host cells machinery to propagate. Viruses lack, among others, key elements for genome replication and viral protein translation such as transfer ribonucleic acids (tRNAs). tRNAs are non-coding RNAs (ncRNAs) with a key role in protein synthesis, as they convert the information from mRNA into a peptide chain. Recently, a novel class of small ncRNAs (sncRNAs) derived from tRNAs, was identified. These are known as tRNA-small derived RNAs (tsRNAs) and are originated by cleavage of tRNAs by endonuclease enzymes like Dicer and Angiogenin. The presence of tsRNAs has been found in several diseases, ranging from cancer to viral infection, and, although it is still not clear whether tsRNAs play an active role in disease pathogenesis, some tsRNAs are disease specific. In this study, we aimed to determine whether, and at which infection stage, IAV infection leads to the formation of tsRNAs. Our results demonstrated that IAV infection leads to the formation of tsRNAs, namely 5’-Gly-GCC tsRNAs and 5’-Glu-CTC tsRNAs, mainly at 2 hours post-infection and at 4 hours post-infection. We also analysed whether angiogenin would be the responsible enzyme for the formation of the observed tsRNAs and if the presence of 5’-Gly-GCC tsRNA would affect IAV infection. Our results suggest that this enzyme is not the main responsible for the formation of these specific tsRNAs and that the increase of 5’-Gly-GCC tsRNA did not affect the formation of infections IAV particles.
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