Varicella-zoster virus (VZV) causes chickenpox and shingles. After local infection, the virus disseminates through the body in lymphocytes to infect other tissues. The goals of this project are to construct VZV mutants to identify viral genes that are important in virus growth and latency, and to test whether these mutants could serve as candidate vaccines.During chickenpox up to 1 in 10,000 white blood cells are infected with VZV. We have developed a system to infect human T lymphocytes in vitro with varicella-zoster virus. Using this system we were able to infect about 4% of lymphocytes in vitro and show that the virus could spread from lymphocytes to other cells. We identified a VZV gene (ORF47) that was important for virus infection of lymphocytes, and was essential for spread of virus from lymphocytes to other cells.
