Roles of LncRNAs in Viral Infections

Liu, Weiwei; Ding, Chan

CMV is a ubiquitous herpes virus that persistently replicates in epithelial cells. A 5-kb immediate-early RNA is a stable intron expressed by human CMV, which is highly AT rich in sequence and lacks open reading frames likely to be translated into protein, and thus is not necessary for efficient replication of the virus in cultured cells after human HCMV infection (Kulesza and Shenk, 2004) . A murine CMV 7.2-kb ortholog of the human CMV 5kb RNA was also identified as a stable intron that facilitates progression from the acute to persistent phase of infection (Kulesza and Shenk, 2006) . This CMV lncRNA accumulates in the nucleus of infected cells during infection and whose stability is a result of sustained lariat conformation (Schwarz et al., 2013; Schwarz and Kulesza, 2014 ).