Restriction enzyme map of herpesvirus of turkey DNA and its collinear relationship with Marek's disease virus DNA.

The genome of herpesvirus of turkey (HVT) was shown to consist of long and short unique regions flanked by inverted repeats (J. Cebrian, Kaschka-Dietrich, C., Berthelot, N., and Sheldrick, P., 1982, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 79, 555-558). In this paper we report the construction of the linkage map of HVT DNA for BamHI, HindIII, and PstI restriction endonucleases. The maps were constructed by hybridization of 19 cloned BamHI fragments of HVT DNA to electrophoretically separated digests of genomic DNA. Our results indicate that the terminal and internal inverted repeats (TRL and IRL) flanking the long unique sequences (UL) are spanned by BamHI-F fragment and a -F-related terminal fragment, respectively, whereas the terminal and internal inverted repeats (TRS and IRS) flanking the short unique sequences (US) are mostly contained in BamHI-A fragment. Both BamHI-A and -F showed a heterogeneity in size, suggesting the presence of amplification of certain sequences in the inverted repeats. We also report that the HVT genome is collinear with the genetically related Marek's disease virus (MDV) genome, as determined by hybridization of labeled cloned HVT DNA fragments with electrophoretically separated MDV DNA fragments.