Figure Gallery

Figure 1 (Right) Negative contrast electron micrographs of intact Simian virus 5 (SV-5) particles (Rubulavirus) (top) and the SV-5 nucleocapsid after detergent lysis of virions (bottom). (Courtesy of G.P. Leser and R.B. Lamb.) The bars represent 100  nm. (Left top and bottom) Schematic diagrams of a member (SV-5) of the subfamily Paramyxovirinae in section (NP, nucleocapsid; P, phosphoprotein; L, large polymerase protein; V, cysteine rich protein that shares its N-terminus with P sequence and for SV-5 is found in virions; M, matrix or membrane protein; F, fusion protein; HN, hemagglutinin-neuraminidase; SH, small hydrophobic protein. (Adapted from Kingsbury, 1991. Paramyxoviridae: the viruses and their replication. In, “Virology,” (Second Edition) (eds. B.N. Fields, D.M. Knipe), Raven Press, New York, and from Scheid, H (1987). Animal Virus Structure, (Nermut, M.V. and Steven, A.C., Eds.), Elsevier, Amsterdam. With permission.)

Figure 2 Maps of genomic RNAs (3-to-5) of the five genera of the family Paramyxoviridae. Each box represents a separately encoded mRNA. Boxes identify ORFs; multiple distinct ORFs within a single sequence are indicated by slashes. The lengths of the boxes are approximately to scale although the intervening or preceding sequences are not to scale. The D ORF present in some viruses is not shown. In some viruses of the genus Respirovirus the V ORF may be a non-expressed relic. In the genus Rubulavirus some species lack the SH gene. In the genus Pneumovirus, Human respiratory syncytial virus (HRSV) has a transcriptional overlap at M2 and L (staggered boxes). There are conserved trinucleotides that serve as intergenic sequences for the paramyxoviruses and morbilliviruses. For rubulaviruses and pneumoviruses the intergenic sequences are variable (1-31, or 1-57  nts long, respectively).

Figure 3 The phylogeny of the members of the family Paramyxoviridae reconstructed using fusion protein nucleotide sequence data and a cladistic algorithm. (Redrawn from Taber, S.W and Pease C.M. (1990). Evolution 44, 435-438.) The topology of the unrooted tree produced by phenetic clustering algorithm was identical to that produced by cladistic analysis. Taber and Pease (ibid.) reported that the cladistic analysis used recovered the phylogeny that minimizes the number of base substitutions throughout the tree (HENNIG86 software and User’s Guide, available from S. Farris, Dept. of Ecology and Evolution, State University of Stony Brook, NY 11794). In that analysis, 1,116 bases (corresponding to 372 amino acids) are compared (PAUP Version 2.4). The robustness of the cladistic phylogeny to implicit assumptions about rates of evolution was checked by computing a Manhattan distance matrix from all 1,116 base positions and deriving an unrooted tree from this distance matrix using the Fitch-Margoliash clustering algorithm in PHYLIP version 3.1 (J. Felsenstein, Dept. of Genetics, Univ. of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195). Human respiratory syncytial virus is the outgroup sequence.