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Journal of Virology, December 2003, p. 13439-13447, Vol. 77, No. 24
0022-538X/03/$08.00+0 DOI: 10.1128/JVI.77.24.13439-13447.2003
Copyright © 2003, American
Society for
Microbiology. All Rights Reserved.
Myles H. Thaler Center for AIDS and Human Retrovirus Research,1 Department of Microbiology,2 Department of Internal Medicine, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia 22908,4 Department of Microbiology and Immunology and Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, North Carolina 275993
Received 24 June 2003/ Accepted 16 September 2003
Rhesus monkey rhadinovirus (RRV) is one of the closest phylogenetic relatives to the human pathogen Kaposi's sarcoma-associated herpesvirus (KSHV), yet it has the distinct experimental advantage of entering efficiently into lytic replication and growing to high titers in culture. RRV therefore holds promise as a potentially attractive model with which to study gammaherpesvirus structure and assembly. We have isolated RRV capsids, determined their molecular composition, and identified the genes encoding five of the main capsid structural proteins. Our data indicate that, as with other herpesviruses, lytic infection with RRV leads to the synthesis of three distinct intranuclear capsid species. However, in contrast to the inefficiency of KSHV maturation following reactivation from latently infected B-cell lines (K. Nealon, W. W. Newcomb, T. R. Pray, C. S. Craik, J. C. Brown, and D. H. Kedes, J. Virol. 75:2866-2878, 2001), de novo infection of immortalized rhesus fibroblasts with RRV results in the release of high levels of infectious virions with genome-containing C capsids at their center. Together, our findings argue for the use of RRV as a powerful model with which to study the structure and assembly of gammaherpesviruses and, specifically, the human rhadinovirus,KSHV.
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