Human T-cell leukemia virus type 1 (HTLV-1) Tax oncoprotein induces DNA damages through Activation-Induced cytidine Deaminase (AID)

Abstract : How T cells are transformed by HTLV-1 is still unclear, but it is well accepted that the viral oncoprotein Tax is associated with genomic instability of infected cells. Tax has recently been shown to directly induce, in T cells, the expression of AID (Ishikawa C et al., Carcinogenesis, 2011), a cytidine deaminase whose physiologic expression is usually restricted to B cells, in which it initiates class-switch recombination and somatic hypermutations to reshape the primary antibody repertoire after antigen encounter. It is also well established that AID-mediated mutations outside of immunoglobulin gene locus are involved in the oncogenic transformation of B lymphocytes...