Bovine herpesvirus 1 (BoHV-1): A review on latency and persistence of infection in cattle

Abstract

Bovine herpesvirus 1 (BoHV-1) is a well known pathogen of cattle responsible for polymicrobial disease such as infectious bovine rhinotracheitis, vulvovaginitis, and balanopostitis. The disease caused by virus is ranging from acute form having active replication of virus to chronic form resulting in latency stage of virus. The lifelong latency is well established in the sensory neurons of infected cattle. There are different latency-related (LR) gene loci, which are expressed in latently infected neurons. Many predisposing factors like corticosteroids, environment stressors result reactivation of latency stage of virus. This ability of virus to reactivate from latency stage in cattle made it an attractive for studying the replication mechanism of virus. Therefore, mechanism and different genes responsible for BoHV-1 latency-reactivation in cattle are discussed in this review.