Element:K-HERV
DescriptionA variety of distinct HERV families have been identified in the human genome, which are remnants of exogenous retroviruses that entered the germ line millions of years ago (Lavie et al. 2004), thus in the human genome was recently estimated to contain 30 to 50 distinct HERV families (Gifford and Tristem 2003). In particular, the human endogenous retrovirus K50D (K-HERV) is an element originally isolated from human species (Lavie et al. 2004) and counterpart of HERV-K10. These two belong to genus Betaretrovirus within Retroviridae family (International Committee on the Taxonomy of Viruses -ICTV- Fauquet et al. 2005) and according to Llorens et al. 2009 is located within Class 2 of the Retroviridae family. The genome ov K-HERV is 9.4 Kb in size including LTRs of approximately 960 bp that flank an internal coding region (Lavie et al. 2004). According to (Lavie et al. 2004), the internal region of this retrovirus contains the typical Primer Binding Site (PBS) and polypurine Tract (PPT) characteristic of retroviruses and five Open Reading Frames (ORFs): one coding for gag, second for a protein product containing the dUTP/PR domains typical of betaretroviruses, third codes for a pol polyprotein including the RT-RNaseH-INT domains, fourth codes for env, and fifth for the ORFX that overlaps pol (as typically observed in betaretroviruses). As observed in other betaretroviruses, ORFX shows multiple stops codons but present a high degree of conservation. Structure
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