Identification of the major structural and nonstructural proteins encoded by human parvovirus B19 and mapping of their genes by procaryotic expression of isolated genomic fragments.

Plasma from a child with homozygous sickle-cell disease, sampled during the early phase of an aplastic crisis, contained human parvovirus B19 virions. Plasma taken 10 days later (during the convalescent phase) contained both immunoglobulin M and immunoglobulin G antibodies directed against two viral polypeptides with apparent molecular weights of 83,000 and 58,000 which were present exclusively in the particulate fraction of the plasma taken during the acute phase. These two protein species comigrated at 110S on neutral sucrose velocity gradients with the B19 viral DNA and thus appear to constitute the viral capsid polypeptides. The B19 genome was molecularly cloned into a bacterial plasmid vector. Restriction endonuclease fragments of this cloned B19 genome were treated with BAL 31 and shotgun cloned into the open reading frame expression vector pJS413. Two expression constructs containing B19 sequences from different halves of the viral genome were obtained, which directed the synthesis, in bacteria, of segments of virally encoded protein. These polypeptide fragments were then purified and used to immunize rabbits. Antibodies against a protein sequence specified between nucleotides 2897 and 3749 recognized both the 83- and 58-kilodalton capsid polypeptides in aplastic plasma taken during the acute phase and detected similar proteins in the tissues of a stillborn fetus which had been infected transplacentally with B19. Antibodies against a protein sequence encoded in the other half of the B19 genome (nucleotides 1072 through 2044) did not react specifically with any protein in plasma taken during the acute phase but recognized three nonstructural polypeptides of 71, 63, and 52 kilodaltons present in the liver and, at lower levels, in some other tissues of the transplacentally infected fetus.