Identification of the gene coding for the precursor of adenovirus core protein X.

Nucleoprotein complexes extracted from infected cells (J. Weber and L. Philipson, Virology 136:321-327, 1984) or ts1 virions grown at 39 degrees C (J. M. Weber, G. Khitto, and A. R. Bhatti, Can. J. Microbiol. 29:235-241, 1983) contain, in addition to known virion proteins, a polypeptide with a molecular weight of 11,000 (11K polypeptide). We identified the gene for this polypeptide by sequence analysis of the radioactively labeled 11K polypeptide isolated from ts1 virions and comparison of this sequence with the nucleotide sequence of the adenovirus type 2 genome. The 11K polypeptide was encoded by an open reading frame of 80 residues located between nucleotides 17,676 and 17,915 in late transcription region 2 of adenovirus type 2; the initiating methionine residue was removed leaving a 79-residue product. The late transcription region 2 that encoded the 79-residue polypeptide (11K) was arginine rich (21%) and had a predicted molecular weight of 8,715. It was cleaved by the viral endoprotease to give two products which comigrated on sodium dodecyl sulfate-polyacrylamide gels as virion polypeptide X. Our data suggest that additional cleavage of the carboxy-terminal 48-residue fragment generates a 19-amino-acid fragment with the amino acid composition of mu (K. Hosokawa and M. T. Sung, J. Virol. 17:924-934, 1976).