Are you referring to virions/ infected tissue with a pathogen rather than RNA?
RNA-later is a high molarity solution of ammonium sulphate. It prevents RNA degradation by effectively precipitating RNAses, making them inactive. When diluted out the RNAses become active again. As far as I know RNA-later does not have a anti-bacterial/antiviral activity (I could be wrong here) nor does it have a detergent effect. I would be inclined to think that samples in RNA later transferred to another media may still have residual infectivity (eg. I would not regard cells with HIV virions in RNA-later as being completely non-infectious and safe to handle without the necessary precautions).
If you were referring to RNA virions, they are in fact very vulnerable. For example, Triton X-100 with a final concentration of 1% is enough to kill HIV-1 in blood. Thus the answer depends on the solution you are working with. If the solution has no detergent effect (like RNA-later as explained by Ian Teo up there), then the answer is yes: the RNA virion in such solution is presumably active. Otherwise it is inactivated.
But if you were referring to extracted viral RNA stored in preservation buffer, the RNA can be considered as what's left after a RNA virion treated with detergent. So it should be already inactivated.
Thanks for your assistance. I am interested in collecting plant tissues infected with a virus pathogen (in RNAlater solution), and then use the collected tissues to inoculate indicator host plants.
It mantains infectifvity:
Uhlenhaut C, Kracht M. Viral infectivity is maintained by an RNA protection
buffer. J Virol Methods. 2005 Sep;128(1-2):189-91
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