Essay On Viral Latency

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Latency is defined as the silent persistence of the virus in the body, not detectable by conventional virological procedures (1). Infectious virus is only recovered from latently infected organs by prolonged culture of organ cells or co-culture of these cells with susceptible cells (5). Therefore, no infectious virus is reisolated in cell cultures inoculated with a triturated organ latently infected.

Latency is the property shared by some viruses which allows them to persist indefinitely in their host after a primary or secondary infection (3). The mechanisms of establishment and maintenance of latency are not yet fully elucidated, but molecular studies are in progress for several herpesvirus models and recent data suggest that latency is under the control of viral latency genes. New hypotheses are available concerning the coding regions involved in the establishment and maintenance of latency and for the level of genome expression during latency.

Viral latency serves as an immune evasion strategy allowing the virus to hide from the immune system by turning off unnecessary viral proteins that might be sensed by cell-mediated immune recognition. The virus persists as a naked nucleic acid, often as a plasmid or episome ,which relies on host cell machinery to replicate whenever the cell divides.
Viral latency should not be confused with clinical latency, which means asymptomatic infection. Latent viral infections can be symptomatic, as in viral cancers, and active lytic viral replication can be relatively asymptomatic, as occurs during the prodromal phases of HIV or HCV infection.

Among viruses, latency is best understood for the herpesvirus family (particularly for
Epstein-Barr Vi...

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...in animals latently infected by two vaccine strains. A recent work has shown that virulent recombinants have been obtained by in vitro recombination between attenuated
Strains of SHV-1.
(1) They must be able to prevent re-excretion, since vaccination does not impede the installation of a virulent strain in a latent form;
(2) they have to be deleted in genomic regions involved in latency to prevent their own latency;
(3) they must be deleted in virulence genes and these deletions must be situated in different parts of the genome to prevent the appearance of virulent recombinants;
(4) they must possess markers easily identifiable: biological or biochemical markers, but particularly antigenic markers.
Successful programmes of eradication of herpesvirus infections will take into account the phenomenon of latency. Silent carriers do not show any clinical sign of

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