The fate of HIV-infected cells after reversal of proviral latency is not well characterized. Simonetti, et al. recently showed that CD4+ T-cells containing intact proviruses can clonally expand in vivo and produce low-level infectious viremia. We hypothesized that reversal of HIV latency by activation of CD4+ T-cells can lead to the expansion of a subset of virus-producing cells rather than the...

Xenotransplantation has been proposed as a solution to the shortage of suitable human donors for transplantation and pigs are currently favoured as donor animals. However, xenotransplantation may be associated with the transmission of zoonotic microorganisms. Whereas most porcine microorganisms representing a risk for the human recipient may be eliminated by designated pathogen free breeding, m...

The discovery of the polyoma virus ( 80 ) pro vides the strongest incentive yet for continued serious efforts to find a human cancer virus. Ac cording to previous experience in the field of ani mal viruses, the polyoma virus should prove to be one member of a group of related viruses with different species specificities, causing similar dis eases. When attempts to isolate human viruses have fai...

Bats are increasingly recognized as reservoir species for a variety of zoonotic viruses that pose severe threats to human health. While many RNA viruses have been identified in bats, little is known about bat retroviruses. Endogenous retroviruses (ERVs) represent genomic fossils of past retroviral infections and, thus, can inform us on the diversity and history of retroviruses that have infecte...

A pathway is a group of genes which act together in a coordinated manner to control a cellular phenotype. The characterization of each set of genes forming a pathway and their organization inside of it represents an hard task in biology. Clonal outgrowth is a cellular phenotype resulting from a combination of acquired mutations affecting cellular genes. The insertion of proviruses in the genome...

It has been reported recently that the human foamy virus (HFV) Pol polyprotein of 120 kDa is synthesized in the absence of the active HFV aspartic protease. To gain more information on how the 120-kDa Pro-Pol protein is synthesized, mutant HFV genomes were constructed and the resulting proviruses were analyzed with respect to HFV pol expression and infectivity. HFV proviruses that contain termi...

Avian leukosis virus (ALV) subgroup J is thought to have emerged through a recombination event between an unknown exogenous ALV and the endogenous retrovirus elements designated EAV-HP. All EAV-HP elements identified to date in the chicken genome show large deletions, including that of the entire pol gene. Here we report the identification of four segregating chicken EAV-HP proviruses with comp...

The lack of bovine leukemia virus (BLV) expression is a consistent finding in freshly isolated ovine tumor cells and in the B-cell lines derived from these tumors. In order to gain further insight into the mechanisms of BLV silencing in these tumors, we have used the YR2 B-cell line, which was derived from the leukemic cells of a BLV-infected sheep. This cell line contains a single, monoclonall...

Akv1-99, a variant of Akv murine leukemia virus, induces B-cell lymphomas with nearly 100% incidence and a mean latency period of 12 months after injection into newborn NMRI mice. PCR amplification and sequence analyses of DNA flanking integrated proviruses revealed proviral insertion into the N-ras/unr (upstream of N-ras) locus in 2 out of 13 B-cell lymphomas, both of which appeared clonal by ...