Avian and serpentine endogenous foamy viruses, and new insights into the macroevolutionary history of foamy viruses

The foamy viruses.

INTRODUCTION ........................................ 169 HISTORY ........................................ 170 CLASSIFICATION AND NOMENCLATURE .................................. 170 PROPERTIES OF VIRUSES ......... .......................... 170 Isolations and serological relationships ................................... 170 Morphology ........................................ 171 Physical and ch...

Evolution of Foamy Viruses:

Recent evidence indicates that foamy viruses (FVs) are the oldest retroviruses (RVs) that we know and coevolved with their hosts for several hundred million years. This coevolution may have contributed to the non-pathogenicity of FVs, an important factor in development of foamy viral vectors in gene therapy. However, various questions on the molecular evolution of FVs remain still unanswered. T...

Foamy viruses are unconventional retroviruses.

Further characterization of equine foamy virus reveals unusual features among the foamy viruses.

Foamy viruses (FVs) are nonpathogenic, widely spread complex retroviruses which have been isolated in nonhuman primates, cattle, cats, and more recently in horses. The equine foamy virus (EFV) was isolated from healthy horses and was characterized by molecular cloning and nucleotide sequence analysis. Here, to further characterize this new FV isolate, the location of the transcriptional cap and...

Retrotransposition and cell-to-cell transfer of foamy viruses.

A remarkable feature of the prototype foamy virus (PFV) replication pathway has been reported to consist of the ability to retrotranspose intracellularly with high efficiency (M. Heinkelein, T. Pietschmann, G. Jármy, M. Dressler, H. Imrich, J. Thurow, D. Lindemann, M. Bock, A. Moebes, J. Roy, O. Herchenröder, and A. Rethwilm, EMBO J. 19:3436-3345, 2000). PFV intracellular retrotransposition (IR...