Regulates Viral Gene Expression in the Chicken.

A rapidly increasing number of reports on dysregulated long intergenic non-coding RNA (lincRNA) expression across numerous types of cancers indicates that aberrant lincRNA expression may be a major contributor to tumorigenesis. Marek's disease (MD) is a T cell lymphoma of chickens induced by Marek's disease virus (MDV). Although we have investigated the roles of lincRNAs in bursa tissue of MDV-infected chickens in previous studies, the molecular mechanisms of lincRNA functions in T cells remain poorly understood. In the present study, was identified from CD4+ T cells and MSB1 cells, and its expression was significantly downregulated in MD-resistant line of birds in response to MDV challenge. Furthermore, loss-of-function experiments indicated that significantly affected the expression of 290 genes . Through integrated analysis of differentially expressed genes (DEGs) induced by MDV and , we found that gene expression levels had a positive correlation with the degree of MD infection and could potentially serve as an indicator for clinical diagnosis of MD. Moreover, an interaction between MDV and was also observed. Accordingly, chicken embryonic fibroblast cells were inoculated with MDV with and without the knockdown, and the data showed that could repress MDV gene expression during the course of MDV infection. These findings uncovered a role of as a viral gene regulator and suggested a function of contributing to tumor suppression by coordinating expression of MDV genes and tumor-related genes and regulating immune responses to MDV infection.