Molecular analysis of endogenous retrovirus HRES-1: identification of frameshift mutations in region encoding...

A possible involvement of HTLV-1-related endogenous sequence 1 (HRES-1) in autoimmune diseases has been recently reported. In primate cells, PCRs and RT-PCRs using specific primers reveal the presence and the transcription of gag-related sequences. However antisera generated against selected HRES-1 peptides failed to detect a 28-kDa protein deduced from the translated gag ORF and described previously. Such discordant results led us to perform DNA cloning and sequencing of LTR- and gag-related nucleotidic fragments. Repeated sequence analyses on distinct samples revealed frameshift mutations in the gag and LTR ORFs. Our sequence analyses detected a stop codon in the gag-related ORF, which is inconsistent with the expression of a 28-kDa protein. Instead of the two ORFs previously found, our gag-related region contained three ORFs. One of them demonstrated higher nucleotidic and peptidic homologies with the p19 gag of HTLV-I. However, the molecular analyses of our new sequence did not show evidence of potent translation capacities.