The bovine papillomavirus constitutive enhancer is essential for viral transformation, DNA replication, and the maintenance of latency.

Bovine papillomavirus type 1 (BPV-1) has served as the prototype papillomavirus for the study of viral transcription, DNA replication, and latency. However, no cis essential transcription control regions which are necessary for both transformation and replication of BPV-1 or any other papillomavirus have yet been defined. We have found that BPV-1 mutants with deletions in the long control region were defective for transformation and replication, with the essential region in the 5' long control region corresponding to the previously defined BPV-1 constitutive enhancer (S. B. Vande Pol and P. M. Howley, J. Virol. 64:5420-5429, 1990). BPV-1 mutants deleted of the constitutive enhancer could be complemented in trans by the full-length virally encoded E2 transactivator and replication factor (E2TA) and in cis by the simian virus 40 enhancer. The constitutive enhancer induced the production of E2TA by activating all the major viral early promoters upstream of the E2 open reading frame. Complementation experiments using a temperature-sensitive E2TA mutant indicated that the constitutive enhancer was necessary for the maintenance of viral DNA replication within latently infected cells and implied that viral transcription under the regulation of the constitutive enhancer may be controlled during the cell cycle. The constitutive enhancer is a master regulatory control region for establishing and maintaining BPV-1 latency, and its characteristics reveal some analogies with cell type-specific enhancer elements recognized in the human papillomaviruses.