Orateur
Description
Recently we discovered a novel mechanism explaining how B-cell lymphomas might be induced in HIV-infected persons. HIV-positive subjects have an increased risk to develop specific lymphoma subtypes including Burkitt lymphoma (BL). We found that the viral transactivator of transcription (Tat) protein, which is released by infected cells into the blood stream, could remodel the B-cell nucleus bringing together the potential translocation partners, the MYC loci at the chromosome 8 and the IGH loci at the chromosome 14, thus increasing the probability of the t(8;14) translocation characteristic of BL. Tat induces the mobility of the MYC locus in the nucleus via induction of a double strand break in the vicinity of the MYC gene and its further repair by NHEJ (Germini et al., 2017, Sall et al., 2019). We shall discuss this and other mechanisms by which HIV-1 Tat and its functional homologue Zta of the Epstein-Barr virus can induce oncogenesis.
