Human papillomavirus type 17 transcripts expressed in skin carcinoma tissue of a patient with epidermodysplasia verruciformis.

Certain types of human papillomavirus (HPV) are involved in skin carcinogenesis in epidermodysplasia verruciformis. However, no gene or gene product of HPV associated with skin carcinogenesis has yet been identified. Here, we report HPV-17 transcripts expressed in skin carcinoma tissue of an epidermodysplasia verruciformis patient infected with HPV-17. Further, we show that one of these transcripts was localized to a portion of the genome which contains the 3' open reading frames of the early region (E2, E3, E4 and E5). The analogous region in bovine papillomavirus type I has been shown to contain a transforming gene (Nakabayashi et al., 1983; Sarver et al., 1984; Yang et al., 1985a).