THE NUCLEOTIDE-SEQUENCE OF THE COAT PROTEIN GENE AND 3' UNTRANSLATED REGION OF PAPAYA RINGSPOT VIRUS TYPE-W (AUST)

The nucleotide sequence of the 3' terminal region of the Australian isolate of papaya ringspot virus type W [PRSV-W (Aust)] was determined. An open reading frame (864 bp), encoding the putative coat protein gene, occurs upstream of the putative 3' untranslated region (206 bp) and poly(A) tail. A 23 amino acid sequence was obtained from N-terminal analysis of the coat protein from purified virions. This sequence has 100% homology with a region of the amino acid sequence inferred from the nucleic acid sequence of the coat protein gene. However, this region is 13 amino acids downstream from the N terminus predicted for two American isolates of PRSV. The coat protein gene of PRSV-W (Aust) was shown to have 96.8% and 96.4% nucleotide sequence similarity with American isolates of PRSV-W and PRSV-P, respectively.