Rhesus macaque rhadinovirus (RRV) gene expression in vivo

Viral gene expression profiling in a rhesus macaque rhadinovirus positive B cell lymphoma obtained from a rhesus macaque experimentally infected with simian immunodeficiency virus and rhesus macaque rhadinovirus strain 17577. The experiment identified two viral open reading frames (ORFs) that were expressed in the lymphoma. Expression of these viral ORFs were confirmed by reverse transcriptase-PCR. The design of the experiment was to identify viral ORFs expressed in virus infected tissue that possessed abnormal cellular features. In this case, we obtained a B cell lymphoma from an animal experimentally inoculated with SIV and RRV. This one sample was utilized as our experimental sample and we utilized CD20+ B cells from six different rhesus macaques sero-negative for RRV exposure as negative controls. To provide ratio data (experimental sample/negative control), the negative control contained a small percentage of tumor derived RNA. There were no biological replicates as only one single tumor sample was analyzed; however, technical replicates (four) were performed and the samples were averaged to derive the values to define the ratios.