Clin Infect Dis 2007, 44:1436–1441.CrossRefPubMed Authors’ contributions mTOR inhibitor CA and JL conceived the study and participated in its design. AF, RM and JL participated in field and clinical aspects of

the study. DR and CA carried out the molecular genetic studies and sequence alignment. DR and CA wrote the manuscript, which was coordinated and critically reviewed by JL. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.”
“Background As adeno-associated virus (AAV) increases in popularity as a gene therapy vector [1–6] we need to improve our understanding of the molecular biology of AAV replication. This will allow for better manipulation of AAV replication and, ultimately, should greatly boost rAAV production. Furthermore, while certain groups fail to see a correlation [7–9], the vast majority of epidemiologic, animal, and tissue culture studies strongly suggest that AAV inhibits the carcinogenesis process [10–29]. Moreover, there is a long history of AAV functioning as an autonomous parvovirus during specific

circumstances. Yakobson et al. (1987) first observed the ability of AAV to replicate click here productively BAY 11-7082 in vivo without helper virus in cells at low levels [30]. Others have demonstrated that a few cell lines, such as COS-7 cells, would allow for autonomous AAV replication [30–32]. All of these early studies utilized oncogenically transformed cells and in most circumstances the cells had to be treated with a genotoxic/synchronizing agent to achieve low level AAV replication. In a more recent study Wang and Srivastava (1998) demonstrated that mutation of the Rep78 binding site within the AAV p5 promoter allowed for low levels of autonomous AAV replication without genotoxic agents in HeLa cells [33]. We have been studying autonomous AAV

replication in differentiating primary normal keratinocytes (NK) as they form a stratified squamous epithelium (SSE) [34–36]. AAV virus particle arrays have been identified in the nucleus of AAV infected differentiated keratinocytes with no concurrent adenovirus infection [34]. We hypothesized that AAV might replicate autonomously in SSE as AAV has been isolated from SSE at multiple body sites, including the anogenital region and the nasopharynx [37–39]. In continuing these studies primary squamous cervical cancer isolates and cell lines 3-oxoacyl-(acyl-carrier-protein) reductase were surveyed for their ability to allow for AAV DNA replication. One primary isolate, PT3, was identified which allowed for 10 fold higher AAV DNA replication levels than NK and other cervical cancer cell lines [40]. In this study no genotoxic or cell synchronizing agents were used. The PT3 AAV super-permissive cell isolate offers us a unique reagent which might be useful in several ways. One use is to identify cellular genes that are needed for AAV autonomous replication by comparing the PT3 transcriptome to cells which allow only low AAV replication levels.