Computational Analysis of Promoters of Immediate Early, Early and Late Genes of Bovine Herpesvirus

Abstract

Bovine herpesvirus-1 (BHV-1) is associated with a various respiratory and genital clinical manifestations in cattle. It belongs to alphaherpesvirinae family with double stranded DNA genome of 140 kb size. As other herpesviruses, BHV-1 also transcribes viral proteins into three kinetic classes namely immediate early (IE), early (E) and late (L). Transcription of these genes is dependent on several important regulatory motifs like OCT-1 (Ocatmer Binding Proteins), C/EBPα (CAATT enhancer binding protein alpha), TATA box and DPE (Downstream promoter elements). Most of these motifs have been studied in IE genes and very little literature is available for Early and Late genes in BHV-1. Hence the present study is undertaken to computationally identify similar motifs in early and late promoters of BHV-1. Computational analysis of promoters has shown that majority of its promoters uses Downstream Processing Elements (DPE) for the transcription of its genes. The genes which are known to express their proteins in high amount has TATA box along with DPE at the optimum position from the transcription start site (TSS). This study provides an overview of the regulatory motifs important for gene regulation and transcription studies.