Molecular biology of type A endogenous retrovirus.

Intracisternal A particles (IAPs) are retrovirus-like structures consistently observable in a variety of mouse tumor cells such as myeloma and hybridoma and in early embryonic cells derived from rodents but nothing is known of their infectivity. Mouse IAPs contain a gag-like protein, a reverse transcriptase and a polyadenylated RNA molecule (IAP RNA). DNA sequences complementary to IAP RNA (IAP genome) are interspersedly present in rodent such as mice, rats, Chinese hamsters and Syrian hamsters at several hundred to a thousand copies per haploid genome. Molecularly cloned IAP genomes from two species Mus and Syrian hamster were 6 to 8 kb in length with LTRs of about 0.4 kb long. The nucleotide sequence of the Syrian hamster IAP genome, H18, predicted a typical LTR-gag-prt-pol-env-LTR structure, although many stop codons were present in the region corresponding to env. The comparison of the deduced amino acid sequences of the pol region showed IAP (type A), mouse mammary tumor virus (MMTV) (type B), and squirrel monkey retrovirus (SMRV) (type D) genomes to be closely related. By using a DNA fragment encoding the pol region of the Syrian hamster IAP genome, human endogenous retroviruses termed HERV-K, were cloned from a fetal human liver gene library. Typical HERV-K genome was 9.5 kb in length having LTRs of about 1.0 kb. The HERV-K provirus could encode gag (666 codons), prt (334 codons), pol (937 codons), and env (618 codons) genes. HERV-K was shown to be closely related to types A, B and D retroviruses. The HERV-K genomes are present at about 50 copies per haploid human genome. In several human tumor cell lines, the HERV-K genome was expressed as 8.8 kb poly(A)+ RNA which appeared to be a full-size transcript of this genome. In the human breast cancer cell line T47D, stimulation of HERV-K genome expression was observed following female steroids treatment. In a detailed investigation on the organization of HERV-K proviruses in human genome, we found repetitive sequences homologous to the LTR region of the HERV-K genome. They were about 630 bp in length with an A rich tail at 3' end and found to be a SINE type nonviral retroposon. These elements were present at 4,000 to 5,000 copies per haploid human genome.