Toxicity of Tomato Spotted Wilt Virus Glycoprotein Signal Peptide and Promoter Activity of th 5' UTR

Cloning of the 5'untranslated region (5' UTR) and Nterminus of the glycoprotein precursor (G2G1) open reading frame of tomato spotted wilt virus has been problematic, possibly because of the toxicity of a signal peptide at the beginning of th G2G1 protein precursor. The toxicity of the signal peptide to bacterial growth and the reason for the expression of the peptide gene in Escherichia coli were investigated by cloning the 5' UTR and the signal peptide sequence separately. Cells transformed with the plasmid containing both the first 30 amino acids of the glycoprotein and the 5' UTR showed a severe growth inhibition whereas transformants harboring either the plasmid with the signal sequence or the 5'UTR alone did not show any ingibition. An E. coli promoter-like sequence was found in the 5'UTR and tis promoter acivity was confirmed with a promoter-less GUS gene cloned downstream of the 5'UTR. In the cloning of the Tomato spotted wilt virus (TSWV) glycoprotein G2G1 open reading frame all the recovered plasmids contained stop codons in the signal sequence region. However, clones containing no stop codon were recovered when the signal sequence and the 5'UTR were cloned separately.