Currently, the Leviviridae and Cystoviridae are the only two recognized families of prokaryotic RNA viruses. Picobirnaviruses, which are bisegmented double-stranded RNA viruses commonly found in animal stool samples, are currently thought to be animal viruses, but have not been propagated in cell culture or in an animal model. We hypothesize that picobirnaviruses are prokaryotic RNA viruses. We identified and analyzed the genomes of 38 novel picobirnaviruses and determined that a classical bacterial sequence motif, the ribosomal binding site (RBS), is present in the 5′ untranslated regions (5′ UTRs) of all of the novel as well as all previously published picobirnavirus sequences. Among all viruses, enrichment of the RBS motif is only observed in viral families that infect prokaryotes and not in eukaryotic infecting viral families. These results will enable future studies to more accurately understand the biology of picobirnaviruses.

目前，Leviviridae和Cystoviridae是仅有的两个公认的原核RNA病毒家族。微小疱疹病毒是通常在动物粪便样品中发现的双链双链RNA病毒，目前被认为是动物病毒，但尚未在细胞培养或动物模型中繁殖。我们假设小核糖核酸病毒是原核RNA病毒。我们鉴定并分析了38种新颖的小核糖核酸病毒的基因组，并确定经典的细菌序列基序，核糖体结合位点（RBS），存在于所有新颖的5'非翻译区（5'UTR）中，以及之前所有已发表的小核糖核酸病毒序列。在所有病毒中，仅在感染原核生物的病毒家族中观察到RBS基序的富集，而在感染真核生物的病毒家族中未观察到。