The proteins of Japanese encephalitis virus

Abstract

Polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis of Japanese encephalitis virus (JEV) grown in both LLC-MK 2 and chick embryo cell culture revealed three principal polypeptides with molecular weights of 8,700, 13,500, and 53,000 (V-1, V-2, and V-3, respectively). Infected chick cells that were treated with actinomycin D and cycloheximide contained seven polypeptides not present in uninfected cells. In addition to V-2 and V-3, polypeptides with molecular weights of 10,500, 19,000, 45,000, 71,000, and 93,000 (NV-1 through NV-5) were found; V-1 was not regularly detected. A similar pattern of polypeptides was obtained by radioimmune precipitation of soluble antigens from cytoplasmic extracts of infected, actinomycin-D treated, chick cells. When virions were treated with NP-40, a dense, RNA-rich structure was detected which contained V-2. An extracellular, slowly sedimenting, RNA-poor, hemagglutinating particle with a density comparable to the virion was present in virus preparations from cell culture and contained V-1, V-3, and NV-2.