That Would Be Telling@BowsacNoodle @Zardoz @Shadowman311 We wouldn't be trying to eradicate poiliovirus if it had a known animal host!
And the campaign would be providing evidence of such a host; getting to the recent very small numbers of known infections in some years is implicit evidence.
Per Wikipedia, monkeys can be infected with it in the lab, and transgenic mice were constructed for a small animal model. Per the below paper found with Brave AI, the former requires direct inoculation into the central nervous system (CNS), and there is as common a "specific cell surface molecule" to get into cells.
Wikipedia credibly claims "Because of its short genome and its simple composition—only a strand of RNA and a nonenveloped icosahedral protein coat encapsulating it—poliovirus is widely regarded as the simplest significant virus." With a claim of only "about" ten viral proteins, that's not many at all.
For example, no N for nuclecapsid structural protein like with coronaviruses that packs up the RNA, mutations in that did better and better jobs for the Alpha and Delta variants, I forget about Omicron. The crunchy protein shell crudely does that.
The "about" depends on how you count them, for example the melts in your mouth gut outer shell starts as one protein, which is cleaved into two parts which are each cleaved again into a total of four. As usual, the host cells provides various proteins etc. to do a lot of the heavy lifting.
Seriously wild, except this sort of thing is routine I think, its RNA folds upon itself, and a lot of that is conserved (mutate one of them and the virus can't virus).
All sorts of wild things naturally happen starting with "junk" DNA that is defined by not directly coding for a protein, instead has other functions including regulation and shaping what exits the nucleus a mRNA, m for messenger from the DNA to the ribosomes that use it as a literal control tape to make proteins.
Or TL;DR: especially with the help of viruses including bacteriophages we understand a lot of this at the molecular level.
Or insight into what DNA had to do biologically is why Watson and Crick figured it out its structure, while chemists like the sainted Franklin and Linus Pauling, the best 20th Century one, were barking up a triple helix which makes no biological sense.
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