FIG. 3.

Effects of silent mutations in NS5BCR RNA on the colony-forming ability of the subgenomic replicon. (A) Illustrated are the silent mutations that were introduced into each of the four predicted stem-loops of NS5BCR. (B) Predicted secondary structures of each the mutated RNA elements. (C) RNA transcripts of the constructs containing mutations in one of the stem-loops were transfected into Huh-7 cells, and the colony-forming efficiency of the replicons was measured as described in Materials and Methods. The colony-forming efficiency of the mutant replicons is compared to that of the WT replicon (see Materials and Methods).