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Defective Interfering Viruses and Infections of Animals

1986; Springer Science+Business Media; Linguagem: Inglês

10.1007/978-3-642-71272-2_2

2196-9965

Alan D.T. Barrett, Nigel J. Dimmock,

Virus-based gene therapy research

Defective interfering (DI) virus particles are generated during the replication of many, possibly all, animal viruses (Huang and Baltimore 1977; Perrault 1981). They characteristically have a genome which contains deletions, often of the majority, of the standard (infectious) virus genome. These deletions mean that DI virus can only replicate in cells co-infected with standard virus. Such co-infection normally results in the enhancement of the DI virus population and a concomitant reduction in standard virus — the phenomenon of interference (Huang and Baltimore 1977; Holland et al. 1980; Perrault 1981). These and other properties of DI viruses are summarised in Table 1. The point that DI virus nucleic acid is encapsidated in the normal complement of coat proteins synthesized by standard virus should be emphasized, since it follows that DI and standard virus are antigenically identical and that they should stimulate and respond to host immune responses in the same way. The intimate biochemical dependence of DI virus on standard virus for its replication as well as encapsidation explains why, for the most part, interference is specific for the homologous standard virus. For an account of the biochemical properties of DI viruses the reader is referred to reviews by Huang and Baltimore (1977), Holland et al. (1980) and Perrault (1981).