Fig. 8.

Effect of the 3′UTR miR-122 binding site on translation. a The HCV translation reporter RNA contains the complete HCV 5′UTR plus the AUG and 30 nucleotides of the core coding region to allow complete folding of the IRES, the humanised Renilla luciferase gene (hRLuc), the 3′-terminal 21 nucleotides of the HCV NS5B coding region including the stop codon and the HCV 3′UTR. b Translation assays. The wild-type HCV reporter RNA shown in a with either the wild-type (wt) S3 binding site or the S3 site mutated (mut) as shown in Fig. 2f was transfected into HuH-7.5 cells along with miRNA duplexes as indicated (either miR-122 wild-type or a mutated miR-122 variant with compensating mutations). Cells were lysed 6 h after transfection and luciferase activity measured