DescriptionHuman Endogenous Retrovirus K10 (HERV-K10) is a C-type betaretrovirus originally described as the sequence homologous to Syrian hamster intracisternal retroviral A-particles (Ono et al. 1986). This retrovirus belongs to the genus Betaretrovirus, which comprises both B- and D-type primate retroviruses. Interestingly, D-type betaretroviruses present a common surface receptor also used by the baboon and cat endogenous C-type gammaretroviruses (BaEVM, RD114), cellular infection by any of them can interfere with other D-type members, and also with BaEVM and RD114 (Chatterjee and Hunter 1980; Sommerfelt and Weiss 1990). This evidence seems to be related with the high similarity displayed between env polyproteins encoded by gammaretroviruses and D-type betaretroviruses, indicating that betaretroviruses and gammaretroviruses may have been involved in an ancient recombinatorial event (Sonigo et al. 1986; Fauquet et al. 2005) or that they share a common ancestor (see env tree in section "phylogenies"). The genomic structure of HERV-K10 is 9.2 Kb in size including LTRs of 1Kb. The internal region displays a Primer Binding Site (PBS) complementary to a tRNALys, Open Reading Frames (ORFs) for gag, dut/pr, and pol/env genes, and a Polypurine Tract (PPT) adjacent to the 3´LTR (Ono et al. 1986; Elder et al. 1992; Payne and Elder 2001). We also have found that HERV-K10 presents a putative accessory gene Orf-x that is common among many other betaretroviruses, and that was originally described in JSRV betaretroviruses (Bai et al. 1999; Rosati et al. 2000). Structure
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Llorens, C., Futami, R., Covelli, L., Dominguez-Escriba, L., Viu, J.M., Tamarit, D., Aguilar-Rodriguez, J. Vicente-Ripolles, M., Fuster, G., Bernet, G.P., Maumus, F., Munoz-Pomer, A., Sempere, J.M., LaTorre, A., Moya, A. (2011) The Gypsy Database (GyDB) of Mobile Genetic Elements: Release 2.0 Nucleic Acids Research (NARESE) 39 (suppl 1): D70-D74 doi: 10.1093/nar/gkq1061