LAT does not play a key role in initial infection or virulence, but is required to enhance latency and reactivation [11,12,13] in at least three ways: First, anti-apoptotic functions of LAT are essential to establish latency reactivation, and replacing LAT with other anti-apoptotic genes restores its latency and reactivation functions [14,15,16,17,18,19,20]. Here, LAT is linked to infection.