Human herpesvirus-8 (HHV-8 or Kaposi's sarcoma-associated herpesvirus) is a oncogenic gammaherpesvirus with a large dsDNA genome of approximately 165kb. HHV-8 is a causative agent in several human tumours including Kaposi's sarcoma, primary effusion lymphoma (PEL) and multicentric Castleman's disease. We are currently using both Roche 454 and Illumina technology to sequence the full genome of HHV-8 found in several different PEL cell lines from both the latent episomal genome present within the cell and the virus released from the cell during lytic replication.

We are also using the Illumina platform for RNA sequencing studies of PEL cell lines to examine changes in the transcriptome of both the virus and host cell as the virus is induced from latent infection into lytic replication. By examining the transcriptome of several different PEL cell lines we also aim to identify genomic rearrangements characteristic and/or causative of the PEL tumour phenotype. This project involves Professor Kellam’s research group based at the Department of Infection, University College London.

Published Genome Data

NC_009333 Human herpesvirus 8, complete genome can be found here