Characterization of Foot-and-Mouth Disease Virus Ribonucleic Acid Synthesized in vitro

The present paper deals with the characterization of RNAs synthesized in vitro with the help of RNA polymerase (RNA nucleotidyl transferase EC 2.7.7.6) prepared from BHK 21 cells infected with foot-and-mouth disease virus (FMDV), strain a 2-spain. Polatnick & Arlinghaus (1967) reported an RNA-dependent RNA-polymerase in BHK cells infected with FMDV. The properties of this enzyme and the in vitro synthesized RNA were described by Arlinghaus & Polatnick (1969a, b), Polatnick & Arlinghaus (1967). The techniques published by Scholtissek (1969) were employed in our investigations. Using hybridization and nearest-neighbour analysis, Scholtissek (1969) was able to show for the fowl plague in vitro system, that the newly synthesized RNA consisted mainly of strands complementary to virus RNA. In contrast to these results the present work showed that the in vitro product synthesized with the help of a FMDV-induced polymerase consisted mainly of plus-stranded RNA. The FMDV polymerase was prepared as described by Polatnick & Arlinghaus (1967).