AbstractPurpose Hepatoblastoma is the most common liver malignancy in children. In order to advance therapy against hepatoblastoma, novel immunologic targets and biomarkers are needed. Our purpose this investigation examine hepatoblastoma transcriptomes for expression of a class genomic elements known as Human Endogenous Retrovirus (HERVs). HERVs abundant human genome biologic...

UNLABELLED Recent studies suggest that human endogenous retrovirus group K (HERV-K) provirus expression plays a role in the pathogenesis of HIV-1 infection. In particular, RNA from the HML-2 subgroup of HERV-K proviruses has been reported to be highly expressed at the cellular level and detectable in the plasma of HIV-1-infected patients, suggestive of virion production and, perhaps, replicatio...

The cellular sites of integration of the avian myeloblastosis-associated virus type 2 (MAV-2) DNA have been examined by Southern blot analysis of cellular DNA from infected cloned and uncloned chicken embryonic fibroblasts. Provirus-cell juncture fragments were not detected in restriction enzyme digests of DNA from MAV-2-infected uncloned cells. However, each MAV-2-infected cell clone examined ...

Qualitative differences among strains of Human Immunodeficiency Virus type 1 (HIV-1) may influence viral infectivity for cells of the central nervous system (CNS) and determine or at least significantly influence the neuropathogenesis of brain infection. In this study, we compared infectivity for these cells in vitro among several different laboratory-adapted HIV-1 strains differing in cellular...

Two models for the mechanism of retroviral recombination have been proposed: forced copy choice (minus-strand recombination) and strand displacement-assimilation (plus-strand recombination). Each minus-strand recombination event results in one template switch, whereas each plus-strand recombination event results in two template switches. Recombinant proviruses with one and more than one templat...

Homology between the two repeat (R) regions in the retroviral genome mediates minus-strand DNA transfer during reverse transcription. We sought to define the effects of R homology lengths on minus-strand DNA transfer. We generated five murine leukemia virus (MLV)-based vectors that contained identical sequences but different lengths of the 3' R (3, 6, 12, 24 and 69 nucleotides [nt]); 69 nt is t...

Endogenous retroviruses (ERVs) are remnants of ancient retroviral infections of the host germline transmitted vertically from generation to generation. It is hypothesized that some ERVs are used by the host as restriction factors to block the infection of pathogenic retroviruses. Indeed, some ERVs efficiently interfere with the replication of related exogenous retroviruses. However, data sugges...