Progressive multifocal leukoencephalopathy is a subacute demyelinating disease that occurs in patients with defects in cell-mediated immunity, including those with AIDS and lymphoproliferative disorders. It is caused by reactivation of JC virus (JCV), which infects 70% to 90% of the population by adulthood, but remains latent in normal hosts. Once reactivated, JCV infects oligodendrocytes and a...

Recent advances in stem cell biology have called attention to the role these cells may play in the pathogenesis of systemic and nervous system diseases. Although not capable of indefinite self renewal and pluripotentiality as stem cells are, progenitor cells can give rise to cells of different lineages. It is infection of these differentiated cells that has traditionally been associated with th...

Cancer is a multi-step disease involving a series of genetic alterations that result in the loss of control of cell proliferation and differentiation. Such genetic alterations could emerge from the activation of oncogenes and the loss or malfunctioning of tumor suppressor gene activity. Our understanding of cancer has greatly increased through the use of DNA tumor viruses and their transforming...

Opportunistic infection of the central nervous system by human polyomavirus JC can cause a devastating disease, progressive multifocal leukoencephalopathy (PML). To gain new neuropathological insights into JC-virus (JCV) infection patterns in PML at the light microscopic level, the highly sensitive indirect in situ polymerase chain reaction (in situ PCR) was employed in up to 15-year old formal...

The replication of human polyomavirus JCV, which causes Progressive Multifocal Leukoencephalopathy, is initiated by the virally encoded T-antigen (T-ag). The structure of the JC virus T-ag origin-binding domain (OBD) was recently solved by X-ray crystallography. This structure revealed that the OBD contains a C-terminal pocket, and that residues from the multifunctional A1 and B2 motifs situate...

When introduced into the germ line of mice, the simian virus 40 (SV40) T antigen under the control of its own transcriptional enhancer and promoter selectively induced tumors in the choroid plexus as well as thymic hyperplasia and kidney pathology. In contrast, the JC virus (JCV) T antigen under the control of its own regulatory sequences induced hypomyelination of the central nervous system an...

The JC polyomavirus (JCV) is the causative agent of progressive multifocal leukoencephalopathy (PML), a fatal demyelinating disease. The current diagnostic standard for PML is real-time PCR testing of extracted DNA for assessing the presence of JCV DNA in cerebrospinal fluid (CSF). This study was aimed at evaluating the feasibility of a real-time PCR assay without nucleic acid extraction for th...

OBJECTIVE To evaluate the prevalence of the urinary excretion of BKV and JCV in HIV-infected patients without neurological symptoms. METHODS Urine samples from HIV-infected patients without neurological symptoms were tested for JC virus and BK virus by PCR. Samples were screened for the presence of polyomavirus with sets of primers complementary to the early region of JCV and BKV genome (AgT)...

In this study of 263 heart, kidney, liver, and pancreas transplant patients, BK virus (BKV) and JC virus (JCV) DNAemia were observed most commonly in kidney and/or pancreas transplant patients (26%), although they were also observed, to a lesser extent, in heart (7%) and liver (4%) transplant patients. The majority of episodes of polyomavirus DNAemia were subclinical, although, in some cases, B...

JC virus (JCV) belongs to the polyomavirus family of double-stranded DNA viruses and in humans causes a demyelinating disease of the central nervous system, progressive multifocal leukoencephalopathy. Its hemagglutination activity and entry into host cells have been reported to depend on an N-linked glycoprotein containing sialic acid. In order to identify the receptors of JCV, we generated vir...