Regulation of adenovirus mrna formation

This chapter emphasizes the current picture of the regulation of adenoviral gene expression. The large body of work discussed in this chapter amply documents the complexity and intricacy of the regulation of adenoviral mRNA production. The most obvious generalization that can be made concerns the relative roles of transcriptional and posttranscriptional regulation. It seems obvious that transcriptional control must determine when during the productive cycle a particular transcription unit is expressed. However, transcription units that are transcribed in adenovirus-infected cells do not necessarily generate functional mRNA species, a situation exemplified by many cellular transcription units during the late phase of infection. Moreover, a subtle network of posttranscriptional regulatory circuits is superimposed upon transcriptional control mechanisms. These can determine both the nature of the end product generated from a given transcript and the relative concentrations of individual mRNA species that may be processed from that transcript. Thus, the fine tuning of regulation of adenoviral gene expression appears to be largely a posttranscriptional affair.