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Absence of xenotropic murine leukaemia virus-related virus in Danish patients with multiple sclerosis

Background

Detection of a novel Gammaretrovirus, Xenotropic Murine leukaemia virus-Related Virus (XMRV) has been reported in peripheral blood mononuclear cells of patients with chronic fatigue syndrome, and in prostate cancer tissue. As Multiple Sclerosis (MS) is a disease with retroviral association (human endogenous retroviruses (HERVs)), we investigated whether XMRV could be contributing to MS aetiology by testing a well defined cohort of Danish MS patients for the presence of XMRV sequences.

Materials and methods

We have analysed DNA samples isolated from peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) from 50 Danish patients with clinically well-characterized MS for evidence of the presence of XMRV gag or env sequences by PCR, using concomitant amplification of the cellular GAPDH gene as control.

Results

In this study, which included relevant positive and negative isolation controls and PCR controls, we failed to detect XMRV sequences in PBMCs from Danish MS patients.

Conclusions

There is no apparent association between XMRV infection and MS in Denmark.

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Correspondence to Tove Christensen.

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Open Access This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0 ), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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Maric, R., Pedersen, F.S., Kjeldbjerg, A. et al. Absence of xenotropic murine leukaemia virus-related virus in Danish patients with multiple sclerosis. Retrovirology 8 (Suppl 1), A213 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1186/1742-4690-8-S1-A213

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1186/1742-4690-8-S1-A213

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