2002. Regulation of Epstein-Barr virus lytic cycle activation in malignant and nonmalignant

Like all other herpesviruses, the oncogenic human gamma-herpesvirus, Epstein-Barr virus (EBV; human herpesvirus 4) manifests two distinct phases in its life cycle: latency and lytic replication. During latency EBV expresses a limited number of viral genes that are involved in tasks such as stimulating cell proliferation, inhibiting apoptosis, blocking viral lytic replica-tion, and assuring accurate and equal partitioning of the epi-somal viral genome to daughter cells. Variants of the EBV latent life cycle, which are distinguished by the latent products ex-pressed, are characteristic of each EBV-associated cancer. Dur-ing the lytic replication phase of the EBV life cycle, many more viral genes, encoding enzymes, and other proteins involved in nucleotide biosynthesis, RNA processing, viral DNA replica-tion, and capsid and viral envelope synthesis, are expressed. Two genes of EBV, BZLF1 and BRLF1, encode transcriptiona