Integration by design
Abstract
Interest in the integration patterns of retroviruses is longstanding. Despite the potential danger of deleterious activating or even inactivating insertions, retroviruses present compelling advantages as therapy vectors (reviewed in ref. 4). Early investigations of oncogenic retrovirus insertion sites in transformed cells showed that insertions were linked to activation of flanking oncogenes or DNaseI hypersensitive sites, leading to the notion that insertion into open chromatin was favored (reviewed in ref. 5; see also refs. 6 and 7). The potential for deleterious …