Premium
Sequence variation of functional HTLV‐II tax alleles among isolates from an endemic population: Lack of evidence for oncogenic determinant in tax
Author(s) -
Hjelle Brian,
Chaney Rebecca
Publication year - 1992
Publication title -
journal of medical virology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.782
H-Index - 121
eISSN - 1096-9071
pISSN - 0146-6615
DOI - 10.1002/jmv.1890360211
Subject(s) - biology , virology , virus , population , allele , genetics , leukemia , human t lymphotropic virus 1 , gene , t cell leukemia , medicine , environmental health
Abstract Human T‐cell leukemia‐lymphoma virus type II (HTLV‐II) has been isolated from patients with hairy cell leukemia (HCL). We previously described a population with longstanding endemic HTLV‐II infection, and showed that there is no increased risk for HCL in the affected groups. We thus have direct evidence that the endemic form(s) of HTLV‐II cause HCL infrequently, if at all. By comparison, there is reason to suspect that the viruses isolated from patients with HCL had an etiologic role in the disease in those patients. One way to reconcile these conflicting observations is to consider that isolates of HTLV‐II might differ in oncogenic potential. To deter mine whether the structure of the putative oncogenic determinant of HTLV‐11, tax 2 might differ in the new isolates compared to the tax of the prototype HCL isolate, MO, four new functional tax cDNAs were cloned from new isolates. Sequence analysis showed only minor (0.9‐2.0%) amino acid variation compared to the published sequence of MO tax 2 Some codons were consistently different from published sequences of the MO virus, but in most cases, such variations were also found in each of two tax 2 clones we isolated from the MO T‐cell line. These variations rendered the new clones more similar to the tax 1 of the pathogenic virus HTLV‐I. Thus we find no evidence that pathologic determinants of HTLV‐II can be assigned to the tax gene.