Large and small subunits of the Aujeszky's disease virus ribonucleotide reductase: nucleotide sequence and putative structure.

We determined the entire DNA sequence of two adjacent open reading frames of Aujeszky's disease virus encoding ribonucleotide reductase genes with the intergenic sequence of 9 bp. From the sequence analysis we deduce that ORFs encode large and small subunits, with sizes of 835 and 303 amino acids, respectively. Amino acid sequence comparison of ADV RR2 with that of equine herpesvirus type 1, bovine herpesvirus type 1, HSV-1 and varicella zoster virus revealed that 48% of amino acids represent clusters of residues conserved in all compared sequences. In the N-terminal part ADV RR1 shows low homology to the RR1 of other herpesviruses. Rest of the RR1 protein contains highly conserved amino acid sequences divided by blocks of low homology.