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. 2020 Jun 1;52:29. doi: 10.1186/s12711-020-00548-4

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© The Author(s) 2020

Open AccessThis article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data.

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Fig. 1 — The diverse impacts of endogenous retroviruses. Intact endogenous retroviruses (ERV) share a conserved archetypal structure of retroviral proteins (gag, pol and env) enclosed by two long terminal repeats (LTR) which are identical at the point of integration in the host genome. ERV integration site largely determines its immediate impact on the host, as integration within or near genes may modulate host gene expression and facilitate continued ERV expression of retroviral gene products or intact virions, which can elicit persistent physiological stress on the host. As ERV copy number increases in the genome, ERV recombination facilitates intra- and interchromosomal rearrangements and acts as recipient sequence for recombination with related exogenous retroviruses (XRV)