title: New insight into transcription of human endogenous retroviral elements.
abstract: It is generally assumed that human endogenous retroviral elements (HERVs) belong to the class of genomic repetitive nucleotide sequences often called 'junk DNA'. These elements were categorized to families, and members of some of these families (e.g. HERV-H, HERV-W and HERV-K) were shown to be transcribed. These transcriptions were associated with several severe diseases such as mental disorders, AIDS, autoimmune diseases and cancer. In this review we discuss several bioinformatics strategies for genome-wide scan of HERVs transcription using high-throughput RNA sequencing on several platforms. We show that many more HERVs than previously described are transcribed to various levels and we discuss possible implications of these transcriptions.
authors.affiliation: Institute of Molecular Genetics, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, Vídeňská 1083, CZ-14220 Prague, Czech Republic. jan.paces@img.cas.cz
authors.forename: Jan
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Pačes
authors.forename: Yao-Ting
authors.initials: YT
authors.lastname: Huang
authors.forename: Václav
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Pačes
authors.forename: Jakub
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Rídl
authors.forename: Chung-Ming
authors.initials: CM
authors.lastname: Chang
mesh_terms: D004251:DNA Transposable Elements / Q000235:genetics; D020077:Endogenous Retroviruses / Q000235:genetics*; D059014:High-Throughput Nucleotide Sequencing; D006801:Humans; D009928:Organ Specificity; D017423:Sequence Analysis, RNA; D014158:Transcription, Genetic / Q000235:genetics*
chemical_list: D004251:DNA Transposable Elements