Murine gammaherpesvirus 68 (gammaHV68) infection of mice provides a tractable small-animal model system for assessing the requirements for the establishment and maintenance of gammaherpesvirus latency within the lymphoid compartment. The M2 gene product of gammaHV68 is a latency-associated antigen with no discernible homology to any known proteins. Here we focus on the requirement for the M2 ge...

Varicella-zoster virus (VZV) results in a lifelong latent infection in human sensory and cranial nerve ganglia after primary infection. VZV open reading frame 47 (ORF47) and ORF66 encode protein kinases that phosphorylate several viral proteins, including VZV glycoprotein gE and ORF32, ORF62, and ORF63 proteins. Here we show that the ORF47 protein kinase also phosphorylates gI. While ORF47 is e...

Herpes simplex virus 1 (HSV-1) is a human pathogen that establishes latency in the nucleus of infected neurons in the PNS and the CNS. At the transcriptional level latency is characterized by a quasi-complete silencing of the extrachromosomal viral genome that otherwise expresses more than 80 genes during the lytic cycle. In neurons, latency is anticipated to be the default transcriptional prog...

Human cytomegalovirus latency in bone marrow-derived myeloid progenitors is characterized by the presence of latency-associated transcripts encoded in the ie1/ie2 region of the viral genome. To assess the role of ORF94 (UL126a), a conserved open reading frame on these transcripts, a recombinant virus (RC2710) unable to express this gene was constructed. This virus replicated at wild-type levels...

Heliothis zea nudivirus-1 (HzNV-1) is an insect virus previously known as Hz-1 baculovirus. One of its major early genes, hhi1, is responsible for the establishment of productive viral infection; another gene, pag1, which expresses a non-coding RNA, is the only viral transcript detectable during viral latency. Here we showed that this non-coding RNA was further processed into at least two disti...

Sensory neurons within trigeminal ganglia are the primary site for bovine herpesvirus 1 (BHV-1) latency. During latency, viral gene expression is restricted to the latency related (LR) gene and ORF-E. We previously constructed a LR mutant virus that expresses LR RNA, but not any of the known LR proteins. In contrast to calves latently infected with wt BHV-1 or the LR rescued virus, the LR mutan...

lower incidences and with increasingly longer latency periods to leukemia death (7). The incidence of leukemia in the origi nal, virus-infected females (injected at birth) was low (35%) with an average latency period of 240 days. The incidence of leukemia in 4 successive generations dropped from 22% to 4%, and the latency periods increased from 372 to 462 days. The incidence of Friend virus dis...

This is by far the most active area of research on EBV EBV infection immortalises B-lymphocytes resulting in a proliferating lymphoblastoid cell line of transformed B-cells with EBV in 'latency'. During latency, EBV DNA and latent proteins (EBV nuclear proteins, latent membrane protein, terminal protein) are detectable intracellularly. At any one time, only a very small proportion of infected c...