Human endogenous retroviruses in development and disease
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Updated: Oct 11, 2025

Microarray-based Identification of Individual HERV Loci Expression: Application to Biomarker Discovery in Prostate Cancer
Published on: November 2, 2013
Jian Mao1, Qian Zhang1, Yu-Sheng Cong1
1Key Laboratory of Aging and Cancer Biology of Zhejiang Province, Hangzhou Normal University School of Basic Medical Sciences, Hangzhou, China.
Abstract:
Human endogenous retroviruses (HERVs) represent ∼8% of human genome, deriving from exogenous retroviral infections of germ line cells occurred millions of years ago and being inherited by the offspring in a Mendelian fashion. Most of HERVs are nonprotein-coding because of the accumulation of mutations, insertions, deletions, and/or truncations. It has been long thought that HERVs were "junk DNA". However, it is now known that HERVs are involved in various biological processes through encoding proteins, acting as promoters/enhancers, or lncRNAs to affect human health and disease. In this review, we summarized recent findings about HERVs, with implications in embryonic development, pluripotency, cancer, aging, and neurodegenerative diseases.
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