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Bovine leukemia virus

Published on October 1, 2007 Reviewed on May 31, 2017   45 min

A selection of talks on Oncology

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We are presenting a lecture on bovine leukemia virus, and we shall speak about virus replication, transmission, pathogenesis, cell dynamics and therapy. Bovine leukemia virus belongs to the retroviruses family.
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Its genome is composed over single stranded RNA molecule, which is flanked by two long terminal repeats. The genome contains series of structural and enzymatic genes, gag, pol, and env coding for the proteins required for the constitution of the viral particle. As a retrovirus, BLV also encodes a reverse transcriptase, an enzyme which is able to reverse transcribe the genomic RNA into a DNA molecule, which is then called the provirus, and this DNA can integrate into the chromosomal DNA of the host cell by means of another enzyme, the integrase. In fact, bovine leukemia virus belongs to the genus deltaretroviruses in which, besides the genes that we had described before, there are four other genes, called TAX for transactivator of transcription, REX for export of viral RNA molecules, J4 and R3 are oncogenes and the regulatory genes. The deltaretrovirus genus contains two main members,