Evidence for a functional subclass of the RTVL-H family of human endogenous retrovirus-like sequences.

We report the discovery of a subgroup of RTVL-H human endogenous retroviral elements, designated RTVL-Hp, that is intact in the pol region which is deleted in the vast majority of RTVL-H elements. As a consequence, RTVL-Hp elements contain critical functional domains in their pol region that other RTVL-H elements lack. We estimate that the haploid genomes of humans, apes, and Old World monkeys contain 50 to 100 copies of RTVL-Hp elements and 800 to 1,000 deleted sequences. The major amplification of deleted elements appears to have occurred after the divergence of Old World and New World monkeys, since we have obtained evidence that a few intact RTVL-Hp elements, but no deleted forms, are present in marmoset DNA. Using the polymerase chain reaction coupled with a direct screen for open reading frames, we have isolated fragments from four RTVL-Hp elements amplified from human DNA that contain an open reading frame throughout a region of pol that is disrupted by diagnostic mutations in all other RTVL-H sequences that we had previously analyzed. Northern (RNA) hybridization analysis shows that unit-length RTVL-Hp transcripts are expressed in the human teratocarcinoma cell line Tera-1. Together, the results presented here suggest that a small functional subfamily of RTVL-H elements is present in the human genome.