Activation/proliferation and apoptosis of bystander goat lymphocytes induced by a macrophage-tropic chimeric caprine arthritis encephalitis virus expressing SIV Nef.

Caprine arthritis encephalitis virus (CAEV) is the natural lentivirus of goats, well known for its tropism for macrophages and its inability to cause infection in lymphocytes. The viral genome lacks nef, tat, vpu and vpx coding sequences. To test the hypothesis that when nef is expressed by the viral genome, the virus became toxic for lymphocytes during replication in macrophages, we inserted the SIVsmm PBj14 nef coding sequences into the genome of CAEV thereby generating CAEV-nef.

Maedi-visna virus and caprine arthritis encephalitis virus genomes encode a Vpr-like but no Tat protein.

A small open reading frame (ORF) in maedi-visna virus (MVV) and caprine arthritis encephalitis virus (CAEV) was initially named "tat" by analogy with a similarly placed ORF in the primate lentiviruses. The encoded "Tat" protein was ascribed the function of up regulation of the viral transcription from the long terminal repeat (LTR) promoter, but we have recently reported that MVV and CAEV Tat proteins lack trans-activation function activity under physiological conditions (S. Villet, C.

Clearance of a productive lentivirus infection in calves experimentally inoculated with caprine arthritis-encephalitis virus.

Lentiviruses have long been considered host-specific pathogens, but several recent observations demonstrated their capacity to conquer new hosts from different species, genera, and families. From these cross-species infections emerged new animal and human infectious diseases. The successful colonization and adaptation of a lentivirus to a nonnatural host depends on unspecific and specific host barriers.

Lack of trans-activation function for Maedi Visna virus and Caprine arthritis encephalitis virus Tat proteins.

All lentiviruses contain an open reading frame located shortly upstream or inside of the env gene and encoding a small protein which has been designated Tat. This designation was mainly with respect to the positional analogy with the first exon of the trans-activator protein of the well studied human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1). In this work we comparatively studied the trans- activation activity induced by Tat proteins of the small ruminant Maedi Visna virus (MVV) of sheep and Caprine arthritis encephalitis virus (CAEV) of goats on MVV and CAEV LTRs with that induced by the human lentivirus HIV-1 on its own LTR.