Molecular cloning and nucleotide sequence analysis of several naturally occurring HPV-5 deletion mutant genomes

Three deletion mutants of naturally occurring human papillomavirus type 5 (HPV-5) were molecularly cloned into phage vectors. The nature of these deletions was characterized initially by restriction endonuclease mapping and electron microscopic heteroduplex analysis and ultimately by nucleotide sequence analysis. The sizes of the deletions are 353, 1329, 1571, and 2267 bp and map to the late gene region of the HPV-5 genome. The 80 nucleotides immediately adjacent to the deletions exhibit no significant detectable sequence homologies or symmetries and therefore were probably not formed by the sequence-dependent events of homologous recombination or site-specific recombination.