A Mechanism for the Activation of the Influenza Virus Transcriptase (Molecular Cell)

The influenza virus RNA polymerase acts both as transcriptase and replicase. Serna Martin et al. solve the structure of the influenza C virus polymerase bound to a peptide mimicking the C-terminal domain of Pol II and demonstrate that binding to Pol II stabilizes the transcriptase conformation of the viral polymerase.