The genome of simian hemorrhagic fever virus.

Techniques are described for preparing intact Simian Hemorrhagic Fever (SHF) virus RNA. SHF RNA extracted by proteinase K digestion in the presence of sodium dodecyl sulphate (SDS) has a sedimentation coefficient of 49 S compared with a reference figure of 47 S for Sindbis RNA. Purified SHF RNA in cesium sulphate gradient has a buoyant density of 1.63 g/ml similar to that of Sindbis RNA. This result leads to the conclusion that SHF RNA is single stranded. This is supported by results on RNAse sensitivity and analyses on sucrose gradients under different ionic strength conditions. Electrophoresis analyses on both hydroxymethylmercuric acid or formaldehyde containing gels, gave a value of about 5.5 X 10(6) daltons for the molecular weight of SHF RNA. No evidence of subunit structure was found. From these results, we conclude that the SHF virus genome is a single continuous chain of about 15,000 ribonucleotides.