Department of Zoology, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom.
Department of Statistics, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom.
Front Immunol. 2019 Jul 9;10:1339. doi: 10.3389/fimmu.2019.01339. eCollection 2019.
HERV-H endogenous retroviruses are thought to be essential to stem cell identity in humans. We embrace several decades of HERV-H research in order to relate the transcription of HERV-H loci to their genomic structure. We find that highly transcribed HERV-H loci are younger, more fragmented, and less likely to be present in other primate genomes. We also show that repeats in HERV-H LTRs are correlated to where loci are transcribed: type-I LTRs associate with stem cells while type-II repeats associate with embryonic cells. Our findings are generally in line with what is known about endogenous retrovirus biology but we find that the presence of the zinc finger motif containing region of is positively correlated with transcription. This leads us to suggest a possible explanation for why an unusually large proportion of HERV-H loci have been preserved in non-solo-LTR form.
人类内源性逆转录病毒（HERV-H）被认为对干细胞特性至关重要。我们研究了几十年来的 HERV-H，以便将 HERV-H 基因座的转录与它们的基因组结构联系起来。我们发现，转录水平高的 HERV-H 基因座更年轻、更碎片化，而且不太可能存在于其他灵长类动物的基因组中。我们还表明，HERV-H LTR 中的重复序列与基因座的转录位置相关：I 型 LTR 与干细胞相关，而 II 型重复序列与胚胎细胞相关。我们的发现与内源性逆转录病毒生物学的已知知识基本一致，但我们发现含有锌指结构域的区域的存在与转录呈正相关。这使我们提出了一个可能的解释，即为什么大量的 HERV-H 基因座以非单 LTR 形式保存下来。
