Marek's Disease Virus Requires Both Copies of the Inverted Repeat Regions for Efficient In Vivo Replication and Pathogenesis.

ABSTRACT: Marek's disease virus (MDV) is an oncogenic alphaherpesvirus of chickens. The MDV genome consists of two unique regions that are both flanked by inverted repeat regions. These repeats harbor several genes involved in virus replication and pathogenesis, but it remains unclear why MDV and other herpesviruses harbor these large sequence duplications. In this study, we set to determine if both copies of these repeat regions are required for MDV replication and pathogenesis. Our results demonstrate that MDV mutants lacking the entire internal repeat region (ΔIRLS) efficiently replicate and spread from cell-to-cell in vitro However, ΔIRLS replication was severely impaired in infected chickens and the virus caused significantly less frequent disease and tumors compared to the controls. In additio

SUBMITTER: Vychodil T 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7925098 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature