At least 50% of human-specific HERV-K (HML-2) long terminal repeats serve in vivo as active promoters for host nonrepetitive DNA transcription.

ABSTRACT: We report the first genome-wide comparison of in vivo promoter activities of a group of human-specific endogenous retroviruses in healthy and cancerous germ line tissues. To this end, we employed a recently developed technique termed genomic repeat expression monitoring. We found that at least 50% of human-specific long terminal repeats (LTRs) possessed promoter activity, and many of them were up- or downregulated in a seminoma. Individual LTRs were expressed at markedly different levels, ranging from approximately 0.001 to approximately 3% of the housekeeping beta-actin gene transcript level. We demonstrated that the main factors affecting the LTR promoter activity were the LTR type (5'-proviral, 3' proviral, or solitary) and position with regard to genes. The averaged promoter strengths

SUBMITTER: Buzdin A 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC1641792 | biostudies-literature | 2006 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature