Project description:Assessment of the effect of Kaposi-sarcoma herpesvirus upon the transcriptome of lymphatic endothelial cells and its contribution to the transcriptome of Kaposi sarcoma.
Project description:Identification of the relationships of Kaposi sarcoma (KS), normal skin to various cell cultures. The effects of KS herpes virus, the infectious cause of KS, on infected endothelial cells are also investigated.
Project description:The development of a prophylactic vaccine for Kaposi sarcoma-associated Herpesvirus (KSHV) would prevent consequences from infection including disorders such as Kaposi sarcoma and primary effusion lymphoma. Here, we study the immunogenicity of noninfectious virus-like vesicles (VLVs) of KSHV as a potential future vaccine platform. VLVs present a repertoire of viral structural proteins but are noninfectious due to a defect in capsid formation that prevents viral DNA packaging. Immunization of mice with adjuvanted VLVs results in virus-specific antibodies and T cells. These antibodies neutralize viral infection, and this neutralization is enhanced by the complement system. Complement-enhanced neutralization is dependent on antibodies targeting the SCR region of viral ORF4. However, this activity was not present in serum from KSHV-infected humans. Our study highlights an important role of antibody effector functions in the development of a future KSHV vaccine
Project description:Agilent whole exome hybridisation capture will be performed on genomic DNA derived from Kaposi sarcoma cancer and matched normal DNA from the same patients. Next Generation sequencing will be performed on the resulting exome libraries and mapped to build 37 of the human reference genome to facilitate the identification of novel cancer genes
Project description:The virion proteins of Kaposi Sarcoma Associated Herpesvirus (KSHV) were initially characterized in 2005 in two separate studies that combined detected 24 viral proteins and a few cellular components via LC-MS/MS or MALDI-TOF. Despite considerable advances in the sensitivity and specificity of mass spectrometry instrumentation in recent years, leading to significantly higher yields in detections, the KSHV virion proteome has not been revisited. In this study, we have re-examined the protein composition of purified KSHV virions via Ultra-High Resolution Qq-Time-Of-Flight mass spectrometry (UHR-QqTOF). Our results confirm the detection of all previously reported virion proteins, in addition to 17 other viral proteins, some of which have been characterized as virion-associated using other methods, and 10 novel proteins identified as virion-associated for the first time in this study. These results add KSHV ORF9, ORF23, ORF35, ORF48, ORF58, ORF72/vCyclin, K3, K9/vIRF1, K10/vIRF4, and K10.5/vIRF3 to the list of KSHV proteins that can be incorporated into virions. The addition of these proteins to the KSHV virion proteome provides novel and important insight into early events in KSHV infection mediated by virion-associated proteins.
Project description:LMP2A of Epstein-Barr virus is a receptor that mimics an activated B cell receptor, BCR. K1 and K15, related receptors of Kaposi sarcoma-associated herpes virus, KSHV, are expressed in virus-associated tumors but their functions are less obvious. We addressed this uncertainty with mutant EBVs encoding the KSHV genes K1 or K15 in lieu of LMP2A and infected primary human B cells with them. K1 and K15 encoded proteins appear to have noncomplementing redundant functions in this model but our findings suggest that both KSHV proteins can replace LMP2A’s key activities contributing to the survival, activation and proliferation of B cells.
