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.

The structure of the BGHV8 genome is fairly typical of a gammaherpesvirus. Nonetheless, there is little nucleotide homology with publicly available gammaherpesvirus sequences. Therefore, genome annotation was based upon homology to other gammaherpesvirus proteins. Upon initial ORF analysis of BGHV8, we did find that a majority of ORFs are relatively closely related to EHV-2 (identity,~75% or lower) using a specialized gammaherpesvirus database in VIGOR. A majority of ORFs share some protein identity with EHV-2 (36) and comprise both structural proteins and proteins involved in viral transcription and replication. Moreover, BGHV8 has a genomic organization consistent with a gammaherpesvirus genome, including the ORF06, ORF07, ORF08, and ORF09 cluster at the left side of the genome and the ORF67A, ORF68, and ORF69 cluster at the right side of the genome (37) . In addition, the presence of a putative miRNA cluster in a noncoding region at the right end of the genome (between bases 121326 and 121820) strikingly corresponds to a region within KSHV between bases 119000 and 122000 that carries a cluster of 10 miRNAs that promote cellular transformation (26, 38) .