from Marco Thomas, Nina Reuter and Thomas Stamminger writing in Cytomegaloviruses: From Molecular Pathogenesis to Intervention:
Research of the last two decades revealed that human cytomegalovirus (HCMV) developed a multitude of sophisticated mechanisms to usurp and manipulate the cellular gene expression machinery in order to achieve efficient viral protein synthesis. Furthermore, there is increasing evidence that the virus has to antagonize cellular restriction factors in order to avoid a silencing of viral transcription. This review summarizes our present knowledge on how viral regulatory proteins modulate chromatin structure, promoter activities, transcriptional elongation, RNA processing and mRNA export. Interestingly, as exemplified by the pleiotropic effector pUL69 of HCMV, specific viral regulatory proteins appear to be able to affect different cellular machineries, thus providing evidence for an extensive interconnection between transcriptional and post-transcriptional regulatory processes.
Further reading: Cytomegaloviruses: From Molecular Pathogenesis to Intervention