Human foamy virus reverse transcription that occurs late in the viral replication cycle

Foamy viruses (FVs) are retroid viruses which use a replication strategy unlike those of other retroviruses and hepadnaviruses (S. F. Yu, D. N. Baldwin, S. R. Gwynn, S. Yendapilli, and M. L. Linial, Science 271:1579-1582, 1996). One of the striking differences between FVs and retroviruses is the presence of large amounts of linear genome-length DNA in FV-infected cells and in virions. We report here that large quantities of genome-length linear FV DNA accumulate in cells infected with FV, as determined by Southern blotting. To determine whether these unintegrated virus DNAs result solely from superinfection, we analyzed the occurrence of virus cDNA of the so-called human FV isolate (HFV) in cells transfected with a virus mutant deficient in the envelope gene and in cells which are resistant to superinfection due to stable expression of the envelope protein. We show that the synthesis of viral cDNA is independent of superinfection and that HFV synthesizes cDNA intracellularly as a late event in the replication cycle. To further confirm this finding, we performed inhibition studies with the reverse transcriptase inhibitor zidovudine (AZT). While AZT had no effect or only a minor effect on virus titers when added to cells prior to virus infection, viral titers were reduced by 3 or 4 orders of magnitude when the virus was produced from cells in the presence of AZT. Our results are most compatible with the hypothesis that the functional nucleic acid of the extracellular HFV consists of largely double-stranded linear DNA.