Venugopal Nair

..Chicken IL-2 can modulate T-cell proliferation and cytotoxicity in vitro and in vivo and dysregulation of IL-2 expression is observed in diseases such as leukaemia...

..Furthermore, insertional activation of non-coding sequences, such as microRNAs, in addition to insertional effects on protein-coding genes, should be examined when considering the risks of retroviral therapy...

..Virus-encoded miRNAs seem to evolve rapidly and regulate both the viral life cycle and the interaction between viruses and their hosts...

..However, the virus has countered each new vaccine with ever more virulent strains. This continuous race between the virus and the host is making the control of this poultry health problem a major challenge for the future...

..In addition, the availability of the whole chicken genome sequence allows the opportunity of exploiting genetic resistance against MD as another sustainable strategy...

..Delivery of RNAi-based gene silencing through live attenuated vaccines for reducing replication of pathogenic viruses is a novel approach for the control of infectious diseases...

....

....

..High levels of expression of MDV-1-encoded miRNAs and potentially oncogenic host miRNAs suggest that miRNAs may have major roles in MDV pathogenesis and neoplastic transformation...

..These data show that an oncogenic herpesvirus, as in the case of many cancers, can exploit the miRNA machinery for suppressing cell cycle regulatory molecules such as p27(Kip1) in the induction and progression of T-cell lymphomas...

..Close sequence and phylogenetic relationships of some miRNAs in this cluster indicate evolution by duplication. HVT miRNAs represent the first example of virus-encoded miRNAs that show evolution by duplication...

..Given the well-documented evidence of the tumorigenic properties of Hsp70 and its interaction with a number of other known viral oncoproteins, demonstration of the interaction of Meq and Hsp70 is significant in MDV oncogenesis...

..Analysis of the functional targets of these miRNAs would contribute to the understanding of the molecular pathways of MD oncogenicity...

..Reverse genetic experiments with the oncogenic strain of MDV type 1 indicated that deletion of IRES-controlled RLORF9 does not significantly affect viral replication or MDV-induced mortality...

....

....

..The rHVT-H7HA not only provided protection against a lethal challenge with highly pathogenic H7N1 virus but also against highly virulent Marek's disease virus and can be used as a DIVA vaccine...

..The identification of these novel miRNAs adds to the growing list of virus-encoded miRNAs...

..In analogy with allosteric models in proteins, we propose IRES allostery to describe such a novel phenomenon. The functional implications of our findings are discussed in relation to host-virus interactions and translational control...

..The future aim must be to develop a sustainable vaccine strategy that does not drive MDV to increased virulence...

....

..Identification of these novel miRNAs will add to the growing list of virus-encoded miRNAs enabling the exploration of their roles in pathogenesis...

..The current study directly compares the ability of each co-RNAi method to deliver pre-validated siRNA molecules to the same gene targets...

..Here, we describe the various technologies of manipulating the infectious BAC clones of a group E herpesvirus as an example through a combination of different approaches...

..These studies improve our understanding of the biology of MDV, an important poultry pathogen and a natural infection model of virus-induced tumor formation...

..The data also demonstrated the application of spectratyping as a tool to track tumour identity in lymphoma transplantation studies...

..Engineering MDV with precisely defined attenuating mutations, therefore, represents an effective strategy for generating new vaccines against this major poultry disease...

..These results indicate that, although the E element per se is not absolutely essential for tumour induction by this subgroup of viruses, it does contribute to oncogenicity in certain genetic lines of chicken...

..Furthermore, the q-PCR test can be applied to researching optimal timing and vaccine delivery routes, and optimal vaccination regimes for different breeds of chick...

..The application of the screening method to identify some of the non-essential genes for MDV replication in vitro is described...

....

..The promoter contains an altered enhancer A element. This portion of the Rfp-Y region also contains a truncated class II B-chain ( Y-LB) gene, as well as a large chicken repeat 1 (CR1) element...

..Although further studies are needed to evaluate the role of these genes in the horizontal-spreading defective phenotype, our data clearly indicate that mutations in these genes do not affect the oncogenicity of MDV...

..No CVI988 ORF was found to be under positive evolutionary selection (omega>>1)...