Background
The development of highly efficient and environmentally friendly plant virus inhibitors with novel structures mostly depends on the discovery of new targets. G‐quadruplexes are non‐classical high‐level structures that are formed by guanine‐rich nucleic acid sequences, which have significant biological functions. Small molecules that target the G‐quadruplexes in the genomes of animal viruses have been shown to inhibit viral proliferation. However, the structure and function of the G‐quadruplex in the plant virus genome have rarely been reported. Investigating the function of plant virus G‐quadruplexes facilitates the discovery of new targets for screening viral inhibitors.
Results
In this study, we found that the 3′‐end untranslated regions (3′UTRs) of cucumber mosaic virus (CMV) 1a, 2b, and CP genes all contain a putative G‐quadruplex sequence (PQS) composed of the same base sequence