Budding efficiency of Sendai virus nucleocapsids: influence of size and ends of the RNA

The budding efficiency of Sendai virus antigenomes, as well as of defective interfering (DI) nucleocapsids of the deletion and copy-back types, was compared to that of the viral genome during infections of baby hamster kidney (BHK) cells. The antigenomes were shown to bud into virus particles as efficiently as the genomes, arguing for the irrelevance of the nucleocapsid-RNA ends in regulating the efficiency of budding. The DI nucleocapsids, however, were restricted in their budding by factors inversely proportional to their size, arguing for an effect of nucleocapsid size in this process. This restriction in budding, however, appeared to be only expressed under conditions of very efficient DI-RNA replication.