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An infectious molecular clone of the Petaluma strain of feline immunodeficiency virus (FIV) was isolated from a recombinant bacteriophage library containing genomic DNA prepared from FIV-infected Crandall feline kidney (CRFK) cells. The integrated provirus has a total length of 9472 base pairs. Three long open reading frames corresponding to GAG, POL, and ENV gene coding frames are evident. In addition, an open reading frame overlaps the 3' end of POL, in the region that encodes viral infectivity factor in the primate viruses. Several short open reading frames are present in the intergenic region between POL and ENV and within ENV, which may serve as exons for production of TAT and REV equivalents in FIV. Alignment of the predicted amino acid sequences of the FIV proteins with those of other lentiviruses indicates that FIV did not arise recently from any other characterized lentivirus.
Talbott et al. (Tue,) studied this question.