Viral Knots

Do the RNAses become irrevocably "stuck" when they try to process the 5' end of one of the pictured zika RNA molecules? It seems so:

> These things pile up inside the cell and start disrupting all sorts of other cellular processes in turn (such as the ones that respond to viral attack!) making for a more successful infection.

If so, that sounds like a really good way to asymmetrically use up a ton of cell resources, since RNAses are huge (on the order of 10k base pairs) compared to the dinky little "knots" (the one pictured looks to be no more than ~100bp).

I have no intuition for how thoroughly stuck they get -- maybe they just keep 'trying' to process the RNA until they degrade?

This is incredibly interesting. Not something I had read about before.

Literal knots in RNA! It’s like a sabotage (in the etymological sense), a wrench in the gears of protein.