Identification of ecotropic proviral sequences in inbred mouse strains with a cloned subgenomic DNA fragment.

Publisher Website
Google Scholar
Abstract
A specific probe for detecting ecotropic murine leukemia virus sequences was constructed by cloning a 500-base-pair DNA segment, corresponding to a portion of the env region of the AKR ecotropic virus, in a pBR322/Escherichia coli K-12 host/vector system. This probe was used to screen cellular DNA of 6 inbred strains of mice for the presence of ecotropic retroviral DNA sequences by the Southern blot hybridization procedure. Three copies of ecotropic viral DNA were detected in AKR/N (a high-ecotropic virus strain) and 2 were found in BALB/c (a low-ecotropic virus strain) DNA. As expected, no sequences reactive with this probe were found in NFS mouse DNA (a virus-negative strain). Cellular DNA sequences that reacted strongly with the ecotropic-specific DNA probe were detected in certain NZB, C57L and 129 mice (all virus-negative strains). In contrast to the reactive sequences in AKR and BALB/c, the reactions were chiefly associated with EcoRI segments that were subgenomic in size.