NUCLEOTIDE-SEQUENCE COMPARISON OF THE M1 GENOME SEGMENT OF REOVIRUS TYPE-1 LANG AND TYPE-3 DEARING

The mammalian reoviruses possess a genome composed of 10 double stranded RNA segments. The serotype 1 strain Lang M1 segment was sequenced and compared to the published type 3 sequence. Both segments were 2304 base-pairs long coding for the mu-2 protein predicted to be 736 amino acids long. The sequences were highly conserved with 97.2% conservation of nucleotide sequence and 98.6% conservation of amino acid sequence. The M1 segments of serotypes 1 and 3 have recently diverged as indicated by the distribution of variation with respect to codon positions. The conservation of amino acid sequence indicated that the mu-2 protein has a relatively high functional density.