Structure of the hepatitis B virus genome.

The extent and position of the single-stranded gap in DNA molecules from Dane particles isolated from two donors of the adw serotype were determined by molecular hybridization and electron microscopic methods. The results showed that in each preparation more than 99% of the circular molecules are of uniform length and contain both single- and double-stranded regions. They confirmed that one end of the short strand is fixed with respect to the single EcoRI site within the molecule and to the nick in the long strand, but they also showed that although the position of the other end is variable, there is a preferred minimum length of about 650 to 700 nucleotides for the single-stranded region.