PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Kazuaki Monde
AU  - Yorifumi Satou
AU  - Mizuki Goto
AU  - Yoshikazu Uchiyama
AU  - Jumpei Ito
AU  - Taku Kaitsuka
AU  - Hiromi Terasawa
AU  - Shinya Yamaga
AU  - Tomoya Matsusako
AU  - Fan-Yan Wei
AU  - Ituro Inoue
AU  - Kazuhito Tomizawa
AU  - Akira Ono
AU  - Takumi Era
AU  - Tomohiro Sawa
AU  - Yosuke Maeda
TI  - Movements of ancient human endogenous retroviruses detected in SOX2-expressing cells
AID  - 10.1101/2020.07.14.202135
DP  - 2020 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 2020.07.14.202135
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2020/07/14/2020.07.14.202135.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2020/07/14/2020.07.14.202135.full
AB  - Human endogenous retroviruses (HERVs) occupy approximately 8% of human genome. HERVs, which are transcribed in early embryos, are epigenetically silenced in somatic cells, except in pathological contexts. HERV-K is thought to protect the embryo from exogenous viral infection. However, uncontrollable HERV-K expression in somatic cells has been implicated in several diseases. Here, we show that SOX2, which plays a key role in maintaining pluripotency of stem cells, is critical for the transcription of HERV-K LTR5Hs. HERV-K can undergo retrotransposition within producer cells in the absence of Env expression. Furthermore, new HERV-K integration sites were identified in a long-term culture of induced pluripotent stem cells, which express SOX2. Together, these results suggest the possibility that the strict dependence of HERV-K on SOX2 have allowed contribution of HERV-K to the protection of early embryos during evolution while limiting potentially harmful effects of HERV-K retrotransposition on host genome integrity to these early embryos.