This paper identifies two structural proteins of the occluded derived viral envelope of Autographa californica nuclear polyhedrosis virus (AcMNPV): ODV-E18 and ODV-E35. In addition, we identify a protein, ODV-EC27, that is incorporated into the capsid of occluded virus, which is not detected in budded virus. The genes for these proteins reside within the IE0 intron. The intron was sequenced, an...

The virus, which causes orf and induces acute pustular skin lesions in sheep and goats, is transmissible to humans yet is rarely observed in North America. We present a case of a 65-year-old female farmer from Connecticut who contracted orf from her sheep. The clinical and histopathologic features, important to arrive at the correct diagnosis of this uncommon yet important infection, are descri...

The expression of the genes of varicella-zoster virus (VZV) is regulated by self-encoded viral as well as cellular transcription factors. A potential candidate with an ability to influence the transcription of VZV genes is USF (upstream stimulatory factor), which recognizes the consensus E-box motif. Quantitative RT-PCR and immunoblot assays indicate stable expression of both USF1 and USF2 thro...

The orf-A (orf-2) gene of feline immunodeficiency virus (FIV) is a small open reading frame predicted to encode a 77-amino-acid protein that contains putative domains similar to those of the ungulate lentiviral Tat protein. Orf-A is reported to be critical for efficient viral replication in vitro and in vivo. A series of FIV-pPPR-derived proviruses with in-frame deletions and point mutations wi...

The utilization of predicted splice donor and acceptor sites in generating equine infectious anemia virus (EIAV) transcripts in fetal donkey dermal cells (FDD) was examined. A single splice donor site identified immediately upstream of the gag coding region joins the viral leader sequence to all downstream exons of spliced EIAV transcripts. The predominant 3.5-kb transcript synthesized in EIAV-...

Virus-based vectors are important tools in plant molecular biology and plant genomics. A number of vectors based on viruses that infect herbaceous plants are in use for expression or silencing of genes in plants as well as screening unknown sequences for function. Yet there is a need for useful virus-based vectors for woody plants, which demand much greater stability because of the longer time ...

Pothos latent virus (PoLV) is an isometric virus with a positive-sense, single-stranded RNA genome of 4415 nt. The genome contains five open reading frames (ORF), coding for five proteins with approximate molecular masses of 25, 84, 40, 27 and 14 kDa, respectively. In vitro synthesized PoLV RNA was infectious to Nicotiana benthamiana plants and protoplasts, but could not support replication of ...

Large collections of protein-encoding open reading frames (ORFs) established in a versatile recombination-based cloning system have been instrumental to study protein functions in high-throughput assays. Such 'ORFeome' resources have been developed for several organisms but in virology, plasmid collections covering a significant fraction of the virosphere are still needed. In this perspective, ...