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Journal of Virology, April 2000, p. 3715-3730, Vol. 74, No. 8
Department of Biology, Imperial College,
Silwood Park, Ascot, Berkshire SL5 7PY, United Kingdom
Received 19 October 1999/Accepted 25 January 2000
Human endogenous retroviruses (HERVs) were first identified almost
20 years ago, and since then numerous families have been described. It
has, however, been difficult to obtain a good estimate of both the
total number of independently derived families and their relationship
to each other as well as to other members of the family
Retroviridae. In this study, I used sequence data derived from over 150 novel HERVs, obtained from the Human Genome Mapping Project database, and a variety of recently identified nonhuman retroviruses to classify the HERVs into 22 independently acquired families. Of these, 17 families were loosely assigned to the class I
HERVs, 3 to the class II HERVs and 2 to the class III HERVs. Many of
these families have been identified previously, but six are described
here for the first time and another four, for which only partial
sequence information was previously available, were further
characterized. Members of each of the 10 families are defective, and
calculation of their integration dates suggested that most of them are
likely to have been present within the human lineage since it diverged
from the Old World monkeys more than 25 million years ago.
0022-538X/00/$04.00+0
Copyright © 2000, American Society for Microbiology. All rights reserved.
Identification and Characterization of Novel Human
Endogenous Retrovirus Families by Phylogenetic Screening of the Human
Genome Mapping Project Database
*
Mailing address: Department of Biology, Imperial
College, Silwood Park, Ascot, Berkshire SL5 7PY, United Kingdom. Phone:
(1344) 294 373. Fax: (1344) 294 339. E-mail:
m.tristem{at}ic.ac.uk.
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