Virus Research
Volume 66, Issue 2, February 2000, Pages 149-154
Yasuko K. Yamada, Mikiko Yabe, Takahiro Ohtsuki, Fumihiro Taguchi
Abstract
The membrane (M) proteins of murine coronavirus (MHV) strains have been reported to contain only O-linked oligosaccharides. The predicted O-glycosylation site consisting of four amino acid residues of Ser–Ser–Thr–Thr is located immediately adjacent to the initiator Met and is well conserved among MHV strains investigated so far. We analyzed the nucleotide sequence of a highly virulent strain MHV-2 M-coding region and demonstrated that MHV-2 had a unique amino acid, Asn, at position 2 at the conserved O-glycosylation site. We also demonstrated that this substitution added N-linked glycans to MHV-2 M protein resulting in increment of molecular mass of MHV-2 M protein compared with JHM strain having only O-linked glycans.
Keywords
Murine coronavirus, MHV, M protein, N-glycosylation, O-glycosylation