Nucleotide sequences of herpes simplex virus type 1 (HSV-1) affecting virus entry, cell fusion, and production of glycoprotein gB (VP7)

The tsB5 strain of Herpes Simplex Virus type 1 (HSV-1) contains at least two mutations (Haffey and Spear, J. Virol. 35, 114-125, 1980; Honess et al., J. Virol. 34, 716-742, 1980); one mutation specifies the syncytial phenotype and the other confers temperature sensitivity for virus growth. These functions are known to be located between the prototypic map coordinates 0.30 and 0.42 (Ruyechan et al., J. Virol. 29, 667-697, 1979). In this study it was demonstrated that tsB5 enters human embryonic lung (HEL) cells more rapidly than KOS, another strain of HSV-1. The EcoRI restriction fragment F from the KOS strain (map coordinates 0.315 to 0.421) was mapped with eight restriction endonucleases, and 16 recombinant plasmids were constructed which contained varying portions of the KOS genome. Recombinant viruses were generated by marker-rescue and marker-transfer cotransfection procedures, using intact DNA from one strain and a recombinant plasmid containing DNA from the other strain. The region of the crossover between the two nonisogenic strains was inferred by the identification of restriction sites in the recombinants that were characteristic of the parental strains. The recombinants were subjected to phenotypic analysis. Syncytium formation, rate of virus entry, and the production of gB were all separable by the crossovers that produced the recombinants. The KOS sequences which rescue the syncytial phenotype of tsB5 were localized to 1.5 kb (map coordinates 0.345 to 0.355), and the temperature-sensitive mutation was localized to 1.2 kb (0.360 to 0.368), giving an average separation between the mutations of 2.1 kb on the 150-kb genome. DNA sequences that specify a functional domain for virus entry were localized to the nucleotide sequences between the two mutations. All three functions could be encoded by the virus gene specifying the gB glycoprotein.