Nucleotide sequence of the adenovirus type 40 inverted terminal repeat: close relation to that of adenovirus type 5.

Human adenovirus type 40 (Ad40) is a pathogen that causes acute infantile gastroenteritis. Ad40 has the distinct characteristic of being difficult to propagate in conventional cultured human cells. The nucleotide sequence of the inverted terminal repeat (ITR) of Ad40, which includes the origin of adenoviral DNA replication, was determined using recombinant plasmid DNA. By using our newly developed program to express the ITR homologies simply, we found that the ITR of Ad40, which is 163 nucleotides long, was related most closely to that of adenovirus type 5, which replicates efficiently.