Meaning of cap snatching | Babel Free

Definitions

Removal of the start of a strand of host cell RNA to serve as the 5' cap of viral mRNA.

uncountable

Examples

“Influenza virus furnishes its mRNA with this structure by a cap-snatching mechanism, in which the viral polymerase cleaves host mRNA endonucleolytically 10–13 nucleotides from the 5′ end and utilizes the capped fragment as a primer to synthesize viral transcripts.”

“Influenza virus polymerase uses a capped primer, derived by "cap-snatching" from host pre-messenger RNA, to transcribe its RNA genome into mRNA and a stuttering mechanism to generate the poly(A) tail.”

CEFR level