Potato spindle tuber virus: a plant virus with properties of a free nucleic acid.

Infectious entities, extractable, with phosphate buffer, from tissue infected with potato spindle tuber virus and inciting symptoms on tomato that are typical of this virus, have properties incompatible with those of conventional virus particles. The infectious particles sediment in sucrose density gradients at approximately the same rate as particles with a sedimentation coefficient of 10S, are insensitive to treatment with organic solvents, and can be concentrated by ethanol precipitation. Treatment with phenol changes neither their infectivity nor their sedimentation properties. Infectivity is insensitive to deoxyribonuclease, but at low ionic strength it is sensitive to ribonuclease. At high ionic strength, infectivity partially survives incubation with ribonuclease. These properties, as well as elution patterns from columns of methylated serum albumin, suggest that the extractable infectious agent may be a double-stranded RNA.