Herpes

[Edward Wagner]

In article <3qvic0$g3l at moe.cc.emory.edu> pkrug at moe.cc.emory.edu (Peter William Krug) writes:
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>From: pkrug at moe.cc.emory.edu (Peter William Krug)
>Newsgroups: bionet.virology
>Subject: Re: Herpes
>Date: 5 Jun 1995 14:28:16 -0400
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>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

If you are going to quote the literature, you should be careful to be 
accurate.  There are a number of promoters downstream of the LAT promoter 
which are active during productive infection.  This has been published 
(Silverstein, Roiz, and me and others including Schaffer).  

The original question here was whether there is a latent phase specific 
protein expressed.  There is absolutely no evidence for one at this time.  

Until one can show that open reading frames downstream of the LAT promoter are 
expressed as proteins during latency, you cannot make any legitimate statement 
about them.  Putting stop codons into open reading frames is a useful 
excercise, but has no relationship to the question of latent expression 
without carefully done controls.  


ewagner at uci.edu