Abstract
The expression of mRNAs encoding the EBNA proteins in EBV infected cells has mainly been studied through the analysis of cDNAs obtained from these cells. The analysis has been significantly hampered by the fact that the EBNA encoding transcripts are present at very low copy numbers. All of the latent EBNA mRNAs seem to originate from large primary transcripts that are alternatively spliced to generate the individual mRNAs (1,2). Studies of several different cell lines indicate that transcription initiates at either of two promoters. One of these is located in the Bam C region of the genome (3) and the other in the Bam W region (4). The use of these promoters seems to be mutually exclusive (5,6). Several of the mRNAs present in infected cells have been shown to contain 2 large open reading frames (ORFs) (7,8). The first ORF in these mRNAs invariably encodes the EBNA5 protein (9), whereas the second ORF encodes one of the other EBNA proteins. The EBNA5 ORF in these mRNAs is formed by splicing using 5’ and 3’ splice sites present in each of the IRI (BamW) repeats. Exon skipping is frequently seen and thus the size of the ORF (and consequently the size of the EBNA5 protein) varies (10,11,12,13). Since the EBNA 5 ORF has been found mainly at the 5’ end of bicistronic mRNAs it has also been called leader protein (LP) (7). Previous analysis of specific mRNAs containing the EBNA2 ORF suggested that EBNA2 might be translated exclusively from a bicistronic mRNA in which the EBNA2 ORF is positioned 3’ to the EBNA5 (LP) ORF (7).
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© 1991 Springer Science+Business Media New York
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Howard, T.M., Hammarskjöld, ML. (1991). Expression of EBNA2 and an EBNA5 Protein from Alternatively Spliced mRNA’s. In: Ablashi, D.V., Huang, A.T., Pagano, J.S., Pearson, G.R., Yang, C.S., Ablashi, K.L. (eds) Epstein-Barr Virus and Human Disease · 1990. Experimental Biology and Medicine, vol 24. Humana Press, Totowa, NJ. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-0405-3_28
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-0405-3_28
Publisher Name: Humana Press, Totowa, NJ
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