[Typing of cattle leukemia virus circulating in the Ukraine]

Bovine leucosis virus (BLV), circulating in the Ukrainian territory, was characterized through the definition of its subspecies affiliation. The pro-viral BLV DNA was isolated from peripheral-blood lymphocytes of naturally-HIV-infected black-variegate animals taken from leucosis-affected farms in the Kharkov Region. The env-gene fragment of pro-viral DNA was amplified, sequenced and analyzed after the amplicon had been treated by three restriction enzymes, i.e. BamH I, Bcl I and Pvu II. According to the analysis of restriction-fragments' length polymorphism, the Ukrainian BLV isolate can be classified as belonging to the Australian subspecies, i.e. to one of the 3 known subspecies. Multiple alignment and phylogenetic analysis of the env-gene fragment of BLV isolates from the EMBL database showed that evolutionally the Ukrainian isolate is distantly located from the isolates' clusters of the Belgian, Japanese and Australian subspecie and has the biggest quantity (4) of non-coinciding nucleotides for the analyzed highly conservative locus of the BLV env-gene with a length of 444 pair of nucleotides.