Alternative Polyadenylation of Human Bocavirus at Its 3′ End Is Regulated by Multiple Elements and Affects Capsid Expression

Alternative processing of human bocavirus (HBoV) P5 promoter-transcribed RNA is critical for generating the structural and nonstructural protein-encoding mRNA transcripts. The regulatory mechanism by which HBoV RNA transcripts are polyadenylated at proximal [(pA)p] or distal [(pA)d] polyadenylation sites is still unclear. We constructed a recombinant HBoV infectious clone to study the alternative polyadenylation regulation of HBoV. Surprisingly, in addition to the reported distal polyadenylation site, (pA)d, a novel distal polyadenylation site, (pA)d2, which is located in the right-end hairpin (REH), was identified during infectious clone transfection or recombinant virus infection. (pA)d2 does not contain typical hexanucleotide polyadenylation signal, upstream elements (USE), or downstream elements (DSE) according to sequence analysis. Further study showed that HBoV nonstructural protein NS1, REH, and cis elements of (pA)d were necessary and sufficient for efficient polyadenylation at (pA)d2. The distance and sequences between (pA)d and (pA)d2 also played a key role in the regulation of polyadenylation at (pA)d2. Finally, we demonstrated that efficient polyadenylation at (pA)d2 resulted in increased HBoV capsid mRNA transcripts and protein translation. Thus, our study revealed that all the bocaviruses have distal poly(A) signals on the right-end palindromic terminus, and alternative polyadenylation at the HBoV 3' end regulates its capsid expression.