Human endogenous retroviruses in development and disease

Human endogenous retroviruses (HERVs) represent ∼8% of human genome, deriving from exogenous retroviral infections of germ line cells occurred millions of years ago and being inherited by the offspring in a Mendelian fashion. Most of HERVs are nonprotein-coding because of the accumulation of mutatio...

Descripción completa

Guardado en:
Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Jian Mao, Qian Zhang, Yu-Sheng Cong
Formato: article
Lenguaje:EN
Publicado: Elsevier 2021
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://doaj.org/article/f125f24d72ce4300b6716fb98a4095d4
Etiquetas: Agregar Etiqueta
Sin Etiquetas, Sea el primero en etiquetar este registro!
Descripción
Sumario:Human endogenous retroviruses (HERVs) represent ∼8% of human genome, deriving from exogenous retroviral infections of germ line cells occurred millions of years ago and being inherited by the offspring in a Mendelian fashion. Most of HERVs are nonprotein-coding because of the accumulation of mutations, insertions, deletions, and/or truncations. It has been long thought that HERVs were “junk DNA”. However, it is now known that HERVs are involved in various biological processes through encoding proteins, acting as promoters/enhancers, or lncRNAs to affect human health and disease. In this review, we summarized recent findings about HERVs, with implications in embryonic development, pluripotency, cancer, aging, and neurodegenerative diseases.