Fig. 1: The host and virus adopt different strategies for gene expression as a result of differences in genome size.
From: Unconventional viral gene expression mechanisms as therapeutic targets
Left, in organisms with a large genome, expression of a cellular gene typically follows a linear pathway that leads to the synthesis of the respective canonical protein product. Right, viruses, which are confined by their much-smaller genome sizes, use unconventional pathways that mostly involve transcription-level (decoding multiple messages (mRNA)) or translation-level regulation to generate several protein products from a single locus.
