Investigating non-coding viral transcripts in Bovine Leukemia Virus induced leukemia

Bovine Leukemia Virus (BLV) is a deltaretrovirus closely related to the Human T-cell leukemia virus-1 (HTLV-1). The natural host of BLV is cattle and much like the case of HTLV-1 in humans, about ~5% of infected individuals develop leukemia/lymphoma following a long period of asymptomatic infection (~7 years in cattle, several decades in human). Experimental infection of sheep with BLV results in a reduced latency period (2 years on average), making for an attractive cancer model. A further advantage of the BLV system is that it is possible to infect sheep via injection of a cloned provirus, facilitating the mutation of specific parts of the viral genome to examine the function of viral products in vivo.
Like HTLV-1, the BLV mRNAs/proteins are transcribed from the viral 5’ long terminal repeat (LTR), a region rich in regulatory elements. It was previously believed that the BLV provirus was transcriptionally silent in tumors, however we identified a cluster of five abundantly expressed non-canonical RNA polymerase III dependent microRNAs (miRNAs) encoded by BLV (Rosewick et al., PNAS 2013). In addition, using RNA sequencing we recently discovered viral antisense transcripts originating in the 3' Long Terminal Repeat (LTR) of the BLV provirus (Durkin et al., Retrovirology 2016) . While 5'LTR dependent transcription is absent in malignant cells, both the viral miRNAs and the antisense transcripts are expressed in all BLV induced leukemic and pre-leukemic samples examined to date, pointing to a vital role in the life cycle of the virus and a critical function in cellular transformation.