Terminal and internal inverted repetitions in African swine fever virus DNA

An electron microscopic analysis of the heteroduplexes formed by reannealing denatured terminal restriction fragments of African swine fever (ASF) virus DNA showed Y-shaped molecules with a 2.1-kilobase-pair-long double-stranded tail and two single-stranded arms. This indicated that ASF virus DNA has terminal inverted repetitions with a length of 2.1 kbp. In addition, under less restrictive hybridization conditions, most of the heteroduplexes showed a 0.13 kbp-long internal double-stranded region, separated from the long terminal repeat by a single-stranded asymmetric loop. These internal inverted repetitions did not match well, since the heteroduplexes melted under conditions where those of the terminal repetitions were stable. In the terminal fragments EcoRI-K' and D', the distance between the terminal and the internal inverted repetitions was 2.4 and 0.4 kbp, respectively.