Herpesviridae Rhadinovirus

The Herpesviridae are a large family of enveloped DNA viruses that cause disease in several animal species, including humans. Herpesviruses have large double-stranded linear DNA genomes of 120-220kb encoding 100-200 genes. The Herpesviridae family can be subdivided into alpha, beta and gammaherpesviridae.

Rhadinoviruses are a genus of gammaherpesviruses that include Human herpesvirus 8 (HHV-8), also known as Kaposi's sarcoma-associated herpesvirus (KSHV). Rhadinoviruses generally infect B-lymphocytes, endothelial cells and fibroblasts and cause persistent lifelong infection. HHV-8 can cause tumours in immunosuppressed human hosts, such as in HIV-induced AIDS or following organ transplantation.

Data Downloads

This project is ongoing and data for this organism will be made available in due course.

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

Related links

• Artemis
• Viruses
• International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses
• WTSI Sequencing

Data Use Statement

This sequencing centre plans on publishing the completed and annotated sequences in a peer-reviewed journal as soon as possible. Permission of the principal investigator should be obtained before publishing analyses of the sequence/open reading frames/genes on a chromosome or genome scale. See our data sharing policy.

Sequencing enquiries

Please address all sequencing enquiries to: pathinfo@sanger.ac.uk