Herpes

[Peter William Krug]

Bruce Phillips (bap at MED.PITT.EDU) wrote:

: 	In latent Herpes, a lat transcript is made but it does not express
: any proteins.  To my knowledge, latent Herpes genomes do not express any

: viral proteins.

This is the currently accepted situation in latency. However, the Roizman 
lab in Chicago found something summed up by the paper's title:

Expression of a Herpes Simplex Virus 1 Open Reading Frame Antisense to 
the gamma1-34.5 Gene and Transcribed by an RNA 3' Coterminal with the 
Unspliced Latency-Associated Transcript. (JV Sept 94)

Whether this ORF is expressed during latency was not addressed, but 
supposedly the amount of protein made is very low and only seen when an 
epitope tag is put into the protein. I recall that at the Herpes Meeting 
last summer, Dr. Roizman said they were putting stop codons in the ORF so 
they could distinguish between gamma1-34.5 and what they are calling "ORF P".

Peter Krug