To investigate termination-reinitiation in the synthesis of the MNV VP2 protein, a 255 bp fragment of viral cDNA was cloned between the SalI and BamHI sites of the dual-luciferase reporter vector p2luc [20] . The cloned fragment, which contained 203 bp of sequence information upstream of the UAAUG stop-start window, and 52 bp downstream was suspected, on the basis of work with other viruses (see Introduction), to contain all of the required sequences for termination-reinitiation. The cDNA fragment was cloned in such a way that the Renilla and Firefly luciferase ORFs were in frame with the stop and start codons respectively of the termination-reinitiation motif to give an ORF configuration 59 rlucVP1-VP2fluc 39 ( Figure 1 ). This vector, named p2luc-MNVwt, contains a T7 RNA polymerase promoter allowing synthetic mRNAs to be generated to investigate the stopstart process in in vitro translation reactions.