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. 2021 Jun 11;9(6):e002932. doi: 10.1136/jitc-2021-002932

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© Author(s) (or their employer(s)) 2021. Re-use permitted under CC BY-NC. No commercial re-use. See rights and permissions. Published by BMJ.

This is an open access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited, appropriate credit is given, any changes made indicated, and the use is non-commercial. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/.

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In vitro transcribed (IVT) mRNA-based vaccines. (A) The DNA in the nucleus is transcribed into mRNA by RNA polymerases. The same process is used for in vitro production of mRNA. The recognition of a specific promoter allows the transcription of the desired synthetic mRNA in vitro. (B) The mRNA structure (natural and synthetic) of eukaryotes consists of a 5′ Cap structure (7-methylguanosine linked from its 3′ with a triphosphate bond to the 5′ of the first nucleotide), a 5′ untranslated region (5′ UTR), the coding sequence starting with AUG and ending on a stop codon, and a 3′ UTR followed by a poly-A tail of usually more than 90 residues. (C) The SARS-CoV-2 IVT mRNA-based vaccines from Moderna and BioNTEch/Pfizer use a liposome-based delivery vehicle. (Note: This figure was generated using images from BioRender.)