Comparisons by peptide mapping of proteins specified by Kunjin, West Nile and Murray Valley encephalitis viruses

The relationships among virus-specified proteins of Murray Valley encephalitis (MVE), Kunjin (KUN) and West Nile (WN) viruses were investigated by peptide mapping of exhaustive proteolytic digests of radioactively labelled polypeptides. Maps of the three structural proteins (E, C and M) derived from purified virions and of two non-structural proteins (NV5 and NV4) obtained from infected cells were compared. For each polypeptide considered, the peptide maps of the KUN and WN virus-specified proteins were more similar to each other than either was to the map of the corresponding MVE virus-specified protein. Since the polypeptides considered together account for approximately 60% of the coding capacity of the flavivirus genome, our results suggested that, for the three viruses examined, the genomes of KUN and WN viruses are the most closely related.