Analysis of the Protein-Coding Content of the Sequence of Human Cytomegalovirus Strain AD169

Large-scale sequence analysis of the AD169 strain of human cytomegalovirus (HCMV) began in this laboratory in 1984 when very little was known about the sequence or location of genetic information in the viral genome. At that time sequence analysis was confined to the major immediate-early gene (Stenberg et al. 1984), a region of the Colburn strain that contained CA tracts (Jeang and Hayward 1983), the L-S junction region (Tamashiro et al. 1984), and what has been termed the transforming region (Kouzarides et al. 1983). This chapter is being written in March 1989 when the sequence is complete except for some remaining polishing of certain areas which is still going on (manuscript in preparation). As far as we know there are no major discrepancies in the data which might lead to the sequence changing although of course this cannot be ruled out. We present a preliminary analysis of the HCMV genome and limit ourselves mainly to the potential protein-coding content of over 200 reading frames.