‘Recombinant Origin of the Retrovirus XMRV’, Science Express, 31 May 2011

May 31, 2011


From ‘Science Express', 31 May 2011

Tobias Paprotka1,*, Krista A. Delviks-Frankenberry1,*, Oya Cingöz3,4,*, Anthony Martinez5, Hsing-Jien Kung5,6, Clifford G. Tepper5, Wei-Shau Hu2, Matthew J. Fivash Jr.7, John M. Coffin3,4, and Vinay K. Pathak1,†
+ Author Affiliations

1Viral Mutation Section, HIV Drug Resistance Program, National Cancer Institute at Frederick, Frederick, MD 21702, USA.
2Viral Recombination Section, HIV Drug Resistance Program, National Cancer Institute at Frederick, Frederick, MD 21702, USA.
3Department of Molecular Biology and Microbiology, School of Medicine, Tufts University, 150 Harrison Avenue, Boston, MA 02111, USA.
4Genetics Program, School of Medicine, Tufts University, 150 Harrison Avenue, Boston, MA 02111, USA.
5Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Medicine, University of California, Davis, Sacramento, CA 95817, USA.
6Department of Urology, University of California, Davis, Sacramento, CA 95817, USA.
7Data Management Services, Inc., National Cancer Institute at Frederick, Frederick, MD 21702, USA.
†↵To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: vinay.pathak@nih.gov
↵* These authors contributed equally to this work.

ABSTRACT

The retrovirus XMRV (xenotropic murine leukemia virus–related virus) has been detected in human prostate tumors and in blood samples from patients with chronic fatigue syndrome, but these findings have not been replicated. We hypothesized that an understanding of when and how XMRV first arose might help explain the discrepant results. We studied human prostate cancer cell lines CWR22Rv1 and CWR-R1, which produce XMRV virtually identical to the viruses recently found in patient samples, as well as their progenitor human prostate tumor xenograft (CWR22) that had been passaged in mice. We detected XMRV infection in the two cell lines and in the later passage xenografts, but not in the early passages. In particular, we found that the host mice contained two proviruses, PreXMRV-1 and PreXMRV-2, which share 99.92% identity with XMRV over >3.2-kilobase stretches of their genomes. We conclude that XMRV was not present in the original CWR22 tumor but was generated by recombination of two proviruses during tumor passaging in mice. The probability that an identical recombinant was generated independently is negligible (~10–12); our results suggest that the association of XMRV with human disease is due to contamination of human samples with virus originating from this recombination event.

Received for publication 1 February 2011.
Accepted for publication 5 May 2011.

1 thought on “‘Recombinant Origin of the Retrovirus XMRV’, Science Express, 31 May 2011”

  1. The authors here have stretched their imaginations too far and their claims have no validity.

    It is unknown if their assays could detect the lower level of virus in the earlier generations of the cell line. The later generations are naturally much easy to detect virus in, as they are treated with hormones. As we all know XMRV is responsive to hormones.

    There is also no knowledge of the lab mice used in the creation of the cell line. A guess is not enough and assumptions are unscientific. They have also failed to look for the preXMRV1 and 2 in wild mice, where a recobination event is more likely to have occured.

    The authors may be asked and probably will themselves be retracting this paper. As the conclusions and investigation are incomplete.

Comments are closed.

Shopping Basket