Reply To Satheshkumar And Moss: Poxvirus Transcriptome Analysis

Satheshkumar and Moss (1) raise concerns regarding the tiling array methodology used to interrogate vaccinia virus ORF expression presented by Assarsson et al. (2). Although they did not dispute the main conclusion (i.e., detection of an immediate–early gene class), they raised other important points. Satheshkumar and Moss (1) questioned the resolution of ORFs shown in figure 1A of our article and asked to see a region in which all ORFs are encoded on one strand without potential competition of opposite strand transcripts. We provide one example in Fig. 1A that shows the clear distinction between signal intensity within the ORFs and in the intergenic region. Resolution of individual ORFs unidirectionally transcribed lacking intervening complementary ORFs. …