engleski

Transcriptomic profile of murine cytomegalovirus

Despite its ubiquity the pathogenesis of HCMV infection is still poorly understood and currently no effective vaccine is available. Murine cytomegalovirus (MCMV) is biologically similar and genetically related to HCMV and is therefore considered to be an excellent model for in vivo studies. To date, many new immunoevasins have been characterized thanks to genetic approaches using gene deletion mutant strains. However, the current genomic map of MCMV relies heavily on open reading frames (ORFs) predicted using computational methods and, more recently, using genomic tilling arrays. Such analyses can miss certain ORFs, spliced transcripts and do not give information about the exact 5’ and 3’ ends of the transcripts. Therefore, the goal of this project was to characterize all of the viral transcription products that accumulate in infected cells, including both polyadenylated and non-polyadenylated transcripts. Similar transcriptomic analysis of polyadenylated transcripts in HCMV revealed many novel genes and gene products, and our analysis of MCMV’s transcriptome, reveals unexpected complexity of the MCMV genome which could not have been envisioned with ORF prediction software alone. We have detected a number of new transcripts and novel splice-variants, along with several S-AS pairs. Currently we’re employing deep sequencing to complement our cDNA library analysis and to extend our analysis to viral and mouse transcription profiles in vivo using WT virus and our published recombinant virus harboring the murine Rae1-gamma gene, which codes for a ligand of the activating natural killer cell receptor, NKG2D. In collaboration with IT researchers all of this data is integrated with bioinformatic tools in a publicly accessible database of the CMV transcriptome.

cytomegalovirus; transcriptome

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