Arginine deprivation and the generation of white variants in cowpox virus-infected cell cultures.

The white pock variant of cowpox virus shows limited growth in chick embryo fibroblasts maintained in arginine-deprived culture medium. Since these conditions inhibit the growth of parental virus, there is a marked increase in the frequency of the white variant in the virus population recovered after passage in the absence of arginine. The variants generated in this system have been characterized by restriction endonuclease analysis of virus DNA in the total DNA recovered from infected cell cultures. Such analysis shows that the white variants arise as deletion mutants of the parental virus, but there was considerable heterogeneity in the restriction patterns of different isolates examined shortly after their generation. Further passage selected white cowpox virus populations with a stable genome configuration comparable with the DNA of pock-purified white variants.