Furthermore, the fact that the Pro-His-Gln has been shown to play a major role in transactivation of viral infection in several gammaretroviruses which are efficiently infectious as cell-free virions [42,44,48], raises the question whether the apparent lack of such a motif in the HTLV simple oncovirus-like SU is linked to the relative inefficiency of HTLV Env-mediated infection by cell-free virions. The gene discussed is ERVW-1; the disease is viral infectious disease.