The effect of binding sites for POU-HD pro-teins (Oct-1) on the replication of HPV18

Abstract

Human papillomaviruses (HPV) are known to infect the basal cells of the epithe-lia. Infection caused by certain type of HPVs are known to lead to cancer. Therefore, under-standing the viral life cycle could be a key to develop novel therapeutic strategies to inhibit viral infection. The regulation of HPV genome replication depends upon the certain viral factors and various cellular factors which could potentially have a positive or a negative effect on the viral replication. The upstream regulatory region (URR) of the HPV genome has motifs for these viral and cellular factors. One such cellular factor, Oct-1 has multiple binding sites located in this region. Based on a previous study it has been shown that Oct-1 binding does have a negative effect on the HPV18 minimal origin. Since, the URR could be filled with a lot of potential motifs for Oct-1 factors, it is important to understand the effect of these specific motifs on the HPV genome replication. This thesis aims to observe the impact of such binding sites on HPV18 replication by performing mutational analysis.