Horse retroviruses

What is it about?

This paper describes a method to search genome data to identify the locations of retroviruses in their hosts genetic material. It also describes successfully mapping transcription reads of these retroviruses from NGS RNAseq datasets back to these locations, allowing accurate identification of the expression of individual retroviral loci. The horse genome has been used as a test case.

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Why is it important?

Working out which one of the several hundred endogenous retroviruses of each class typically found in a host genome is responsible for RNA transcripts is difficult with most methods not accurate enough to identify expression from individual loci. This paper covers using NGS technology to do this more accurately