AUTHOR CORRECTION
Volume 85, no. 11, p. 5363–5373, 2011, https://doi.org/10.1128/JVI.00115-11. This paper demonstrated that herpes simplex virus vhs (UL41) mutants display a cell type-specific defect in the translation of viral true late mRNAs. The defect manifests in some (e.g., HeLa) but not other (e.g., Vero) cell lines, a conclusion that we have amply confirmed in several additional studies (B. Dauber, D. Poon, T. Dos Santos, B. A. Duguay, et al., J Virol 90:6049–6057, 2016, https://doi.org/10.1128/JVI.03180-15; B. Dauber, H. A. Saffran, and J. R. Smiley, J Virol 88:9624–9632, 2014, https://doi.org/10.1128/JVI.01350-14). Here we report an error in the description of one of the cell lines used (telomerase-immortalized human foreskin fibroblasts or HFF cells) and describe the impact of this error on the characterization of the HFF cell phenotype.
In this paper, HFF cells were found to restrict true late protein expression in the absence of vhs (Fig. 4). However, our current HFF cultures consistently support efficient vhs-independent expression of several HSV true late proteins, including US11 and glycoprotein C, in contrast to our previous findings. While investigating the source of this discrepancy, we realized that the HFF cells used in the experiments shown in Fig. 4 (and Fig. 1) had been obtained from the lab of Thomas Shenk, not from the lab of Wade Bresnahan as reported. We subsequently discovered that these cells were contaminated with mycoplasma. Contamination-free HFF cultures from the Bresnahan lab were used in the viral growth curves shown in Fig. 3 and in our more recent gene expression studies (unpublished data). The HFF cells obtained from the Bresnahan lab resemble permissive Vero cells in that they support efficient vhs-independent accumulation of several true late proteins, in contrast to the restrictive phenotype exhibited by the cultures used in Fig. 4. Whether this difference reflects the impact of contaminating mycoplasma or instead stems from other uncharacterized factors (e.g., passage level) remains unknown.
We apologize for this error, which does not affect the conclusions of our original study, namely, that vhs is required for true late protein expression in some but not all cell lines and that the effect of vhs is exerted at the level of translation.