Chapter category: Viruses

Phylogeny of Human Endogenous and Exogenous Retroviruses

This chapter appears in the following book:

Retroviruses and Primate Genome Evolution

Edited by: Eugene Sverdlov
ISBN: 1-58706-213-5
» Get more information about this book at landesbioscience.com «

Chapter authors:
Aris Katzourakis and Michael Tristem

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The human genome contains a number of human endogenous retrovirus (HERV) families, each resulting from a single germ-line infection. Here we combine information on all previously described HERV families, and further search the human genome sequencing project databases to add taxa to taxon poor areas of the retroviral phylogeny. We use the highly conserved retroviral reverse transcriptase (RT) motif to construct phylogenies and provide the most comprehensive phylogeny reported to date, consisting of 352 HERVs from 31 HERV families. This phylogeny was used to determine the relationships of HERVs to exogenous retroviruses, and to endogenous retroviruses from other taxa. We confirm that most HERV families are not closely related to exogenous retroviruses. Of the 31 families, 23 are assigned to Class I, 4 to Class II and 4 to Class III. Furthermore, we characterize seven novel HERV families and further characterize two for which only partial information was previously available. Three of the HERV proviruses described here are particularly interesting as they may represent some of the oldest integrations into the primate lineage, with one element having integrated between 62 and 100 millions of years ago.

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Chapter category: Viruses

Phylogeny of Human Endogenous and Exogenous Retroviruses

Additional chapters from this book:

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