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Copyright © 2008 Eaton et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. Expression of frog virus 3 genes is impaired in mammalian cell lines Heather E Eaton,1 Julie Metcalf,2 and Craig R Brunetti  11Department of Biology, Trent University, Peterborough, ON, Canada 2Department of Laboratory Medicine and Pathobiology, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada Corresponding author.Heather E Eaton: heathereaton/at/trentu.ca; Julie Metcalf: juliem/at/cogeco.ca; Craig R Brunetti: craigbrunetti/at/trentu.ca Received May 28, 2008; Accepted July 21, 2008. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. | ||||
Abstract Frog virus 3 (FV3) is a large DNA virus that is the prototypic member of the family Iridoviridae. To examine levels of FV3 gene expression we generated a polyclonal antibody against the FV3 protein 75L. Following a FV3 infection in fathead minnow (FHM) cells 75L was found in vesicles throughout the cytoplasm as early as 3 hours post-infection. While 75L expressed strongly in FHM cells, our findings revealed no 75L expression in mammalian cells lines despite evidence of a FV3 infection. One explanation for the lack of gene expression in mammalian cell lines may be inefficient codon usage. As a result, 75L was codon optimized and transfection of the codon optimized construct resulted in detectable expression in mammalian cells. Therefore, although FV3 can infect and replicate in mammalian cell lines, the virus may not express its full complement of genes due to inefficient codon usage in mammalian species. | ||||
