Laboratory Study
The fact that the papillomavirus life cycle strictly requires keratinocyte differentiation has posed a substantial barrier to the study of papillomaviruses in the laboratory, since it has precluded the use of conventional cell lines to grow the viruses. Because infectious BPV-1 virions can be extracted from the large warts the virus induces on cattle, it has been a workhorse model papillomavirus type for many years. CRPV, rabbit oral papillomavirus (ROPV) and canine oral papillomavirus (COPV) have also been used extensively for laboratory studies.
Some sexually transmitted HPV types have been propagated using a mouse “xenograft” system, in which HPV-infected human cells are implanted into immunodeficient mice. More recently, some groups have succeeded in isolating infectious HPV-16 from human cervical lesions. However, isolation of infectious virions using this technique is arduous and the yield of infectious virus is very low.
The differentiation of keratinocytes can be mimicked in vitro by exposing cultured keratinocytes to an air/liquid interface. The adaptation of such “raft culture” systems to the study of papillomaviruses was a significant breakthrough for in vitro study of the viral life cycle. However, raft culture systems are relatively cumbersome and the yield of infectious HPVs can be low.
The development of a yeast-based system that allows stable episomal HPV replication provides a convenient, rapid and inexpensive means to study several aspects of the HPV lifecycle (Angeletti 2002). For example, E2-dependent transcription, genome amplification and efficient encapsidation of full-length HPV DNAs can be easily recreated in yeast (Angeletti 2005).
Recently, transient high-yield methods for producing HPV pseudoviruses carrying reporter genes has been developed. Although pseudoviruses are not suitable for studying certain aspects of the viral life cycle, initial studies suggest that their structure and initial infectious entry into cells is probably similar in many ways to authentic papillomaviruses.
Read more about this topic: Papillomaviridae
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