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Copyright © 2008 Schleiss et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. Analysis of the nucleotide sequence of the guinea pig cytomegalovirus (GPCMV) genome Mark R Schleiss,  1 Alistair McGregor,1 K Yeon Choi,1 Shailesh V Date,2 Xiaohong Cui,3 and Michael A McVoy31Center for Infectious Diseases and Microbiology Translational Research, University of Minnesota, 2001 6th Street SE, Minneapolis, MN 55455, USA 2Genentech, Inc., 1 DNA Way, South San Francisco, CA 94080, USA 3Division of Infectious Diseases, Department of Pediatrics, Virginia Commonwealth University School of Medicine, P.O. Box 163, MCV Station, Richmond, VA 23298, USA Corresponding author.Mark R Schleiss: schleiss/at/umn.edu; Alistair McGregor: mcgre077/at/umn.edu; K Yeon Choi: choix207/at/umn.edu; Shailesh V Date: date.shailesh/at/gene.com; Xiaohong Cui: xcui/at/vcu.edu; Michael A McVoy: mmcvoy/at/vcu.edu Received October 15, 2008; Accepted November 12, 2008. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. | ||||
Abstract In this report we describe the genomic sequence of guinea pig cytomegalovirus (GPCMV) assembled from a tissue culture-derived bacterial artificial chromosome clone, plasmid clones of viral restriction fragments, and direct PCR sequencing of viral DNA. The GPCMV genome is 232,678 bp, excluding the terminal repeats, and has a GC content of 55%. A total of 105 open reading frames (ORFs) of > 100 amino acids with sequence and/or positional homology to other CMV ORFs were annotated. Positional and sequence homologs of human cytomegalovirus open reading frames UL23 through UL122 were identified. Homology with other cytomegaloviruses was most prominent in the central ~60% of the genome, with divergence of sequence and lack of conserved homologs at the respective genomic termini. Of interest, the GPCMV genome was found in many cases to bear stronger phylogenetic similarity to primate CMVs than to rodent CMVs. The sequence of GPCMV should facilitate vaccine and pathogenesis studies in this model of congenital CMV infection. | ||||
