Abstract
Within the field of retrovirus, our knowledge of foamy viruses (FV) is still limited. Their unique replication strategy and mechanism of viral persistency needs further research to gain understanding of the virus-host interactions, especially in the light of the recent findings suggesting their ancient origin and long co-evolution with their nonhuman hosts. Unquestionably, the most studied member is the primate/prototype foamy virus (PFV) which was originally isolated from a human (designated as human foamy virus, HFV), but later identified as chimpanzee origin; phylogenetic analysis clearly places it among other Old World primates. Additionally, the study of non-simian animal FVs can contribute to a deeper understanding of FV-host interactions and development of other animal models. The review aims at highlighting areas of special interest regarding the structure, biology, virus-host interactions and interspecies transmission potential of primate as well as non-primate foamy viruses for gaining new insights into FV biology.
Highlights
Within the field of retrovirus, our knowledge of foamy viruses (FV) is still limited
As FVs are complex retroviruses like the lentiviral human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and encode the canonical gag, pol and env genes flanked by the long terminal repeats (LTRs) and additional accessory genes designated as tas and bel2 open reading frames (ORF)
As opposed to the Orthoretroviridae FVs almost exclusively make use of a furin cleavage site to clip Elp off the SU-domain of Env [59,78]. Despite this fundamental difference of using a furin-mediated cleavage instead of signal peptidases as observed for other retroviruses FV Elp has an additional post-targeting function since it was proven for prototype foamy virus (PFV) and FFV, that Elp is incorporated into the virus particles and is vitally essential for viral budding, for the highly conserved tryptophans in Elp are required for the
Summary
We will not provide a full review of non-simian foamy virus (FV) biology (hereafter referred to as animal FVs) and their features since many of these aspects have been recently described, especially from the perspective of the prototype foamy virus (PFV) [1,2,3,4]. In this review we will describe and discuss features where studies on the animal FVs significantly contributed to our overall understanding of FV biology. Studies on animal FVs offer, due to the possibility to conduct comparably easy animal experimentation, a unique chance to analyze in details and depth the virus–host interaction at a cellular, organismal and cladal (epidemiological) level. In this context, the potential of zoonotic transmissions as well as interspecies transmissions will be discussed
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