Question

how does the head and tail look like in the specimen​

Answer 1

Parvoviruses are single stranded DNA viruses that replicate in a so called “rolling-hairpin” mechanism, a variant of the rolling circle replication known for bacteriophages like φX174. The replication intermediates of parvoviruses thus are concatemers of head-to-head or tail-to-tail structure. Surprisingly, in case of the novel human bocavirus, neither head-to-head nor tail-to-tail DNA sequences were detected in clinical isolates; in contrast head-to-tail DNA sequences were identified by PCR and sequencing. Thereby, the head-to-tail sequences were linked by a novel sequence of 54 bp of which 20 bp also occur as conserved structures of the palindromic ends of parvovirus MVC which in turn is a close relative to human bocavirus.

Citation: Lüsebrink J, Schildgen V, Tillmann RL, Wittleben F, Böhmer A, Müller A, et al. (2011) Detection of Head-to-Tail DNA Sequences of Human Bocavirus in Clinical Samples. PLoS ONE 6(5): e19457. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0019457

Editor: Volker Thiel, Kantonal Hospital St. Gallen, Switzerland

Received: January 19, 2011; Accepted: March 30, 2011; Published: May 4, 2011

Copyright: © 2011 Lüsebrink et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Funding: This work was partially supported by unrestricted research grants from the Deutsche Lungenstiftung e.V. (Hannover, Germany), the Else Kröner-Fresenius Stiftung (Bad Homburg, Germany), and the Research Award 2009 from the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Pädiatrische Infektiologie (DGPI) (Bremen, Germany) to O.S. and A.M. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript

Answer 2

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Parvoviruses are single stranded DNA viruses that replicate in a so called “rolling-hairpin” mechanism, a variant of the rolling circle replication known for bacteriophages like φX174. The replication intermediates of parvoviruses thus are concatemers of head-to-head or tail-to-tail structure. Surprisingly, in case of the novel human bocavirus, neither head-to-head nor tail-to-tail DNA sequences were detected in clinical isolates; in contrast head-to-tail DNA sequences were identified by PCR and sequencing. Thereby, the head-to-tail sequences were linked by a novel sequence of 54 bp of which 20 bp also occur as conserved structures of the palindromic ends of parvovirus MVC which in turn is a close relative to human bocavirus.

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