Isolation and Characterization of a Novel Gammaherpesvirus from a Microbat Cell Line

Shabman, Reed S.; Shrivastava, Susmita; Tsibane, Tshidi; Attie, Oliver; Jayaprakash, Anitha; Mire, Chad E.; Dilley, Kari E.; Puri, Vinita; Stockwell, Timothy B.; Geisbert, Thomas W.; Sachidanandam, Ravi; Basler, Christopher F.

Mapping of tandem repeats and putative miRNAs carried in the BGHV8 genome. We analyzed the assembled BGHV8 sequence in a tandem repeat finder program (http://tandem.bu.edu/trf/trf.html) that was previously used to identify repeat regions in a mouse gammaherpesvirus genome (25) . This analysis highlighted repeat regions, consistent with other gammaherpesvirus genomes (Fig. 4, black arrows) . These are in locations similar to those of repeat regions found in other rhadinoviruses, such as Kaposi's sarcoma-associated herpesvirus/human herpesvirus 8 (KSHV/HHV-8) (26) . In addition, a small-RNA capture performed according to established methods (27) to isolate small RNAs identified a large number of putative microRNA (miRNA) sequences within the MVI-it cell line (data not shown). Analysis of these MVI-it small RNAs yielded sequences mapping to three independent regions within the BGHV8 genome between positions 121326 and 121820. These small RNAs are located in a BGHV8 repeat region similar to a location of microRNAs carried by KSHV (26) . Therefore, we hypothesize that these sequences may reflect the production of small processed RNAs (such as miRNAs) during BGHV8 infection within the MVI-it cell culture.