Proposed replicative role of the NS polypeptide of vesicular stomatitis virus: structural analysis of an electrophoretic variant.

The structural lesion in the temperature-sensitive mutant E1 of the New Jersey serotype of vesicular stomatitis virus has been assigned to the NS protein. Although the packaged wild-type and mutant NS proteins were similarly phosphorylated, the mutant NS protein migrated faster than the wild-type NS protein in polyacrylamide slab gels electrophoresed in the presence of sodium dodecyl sulfate. The resolution appears to be the result of conformational rather than size differences since the two proteins comigrated in polyacrylamide gels which contained 4 M urea in addition to sodium dodecyl sulfate. Peptide maps, obtained by limited proteolysis of 32P-labeled wild-type and mutant NS proteins with Staphylococcus aureus V8 protease and papain, revealed striking differences which suggested that the mutant alteration could involve an aspartic or glutamic acid residue. Since NS proteins obtained from naturally occurring revertants of E1 were indistinguishable from the wild-type protein in all of these analyses, the structural alteration in the mutant NS protein correlates with the functional lesion. Because E1 is defective in the RNA replication pathway at the restrictive temperature, a replicative role is proposed for the NS protein.