Nucleotide sequence of the transforming region of human cytomegalovirus

We report the nucleotide sequence of a BamHI-HindIII fragment of human cytomegalovirus containing the region (XbaI-HindIII) capable of transforming NIH3T3 cells. The single EcoRI site, shown to abolish transforming activity if cleaved, is present within an 8 base-pair inverted complementary repeat. Close to this sequence there is a small, potentially spliced, open reading frame possessing some of the signals involved in eukaryotic gene expression. Possible mechanisms of transformation, involving the inverted repeat sequence, are discussed.