Comparison of proteins specified by Murray Valley encephalitis, West Nile, Japanese encephalitis and St. Louis encephalitis viruses.

The relationships among proteins specified by Murray Valley encephalitis (MVE), West Nile (WN), Japanese encephalitis (JE) and St. Louis encephalitis (SLE) viruses were examined by peptide mapping. [3H]methionine-labelled tryptic peptides of viral proteins were separated by reverse phase high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) and the separation profiles for a given protein specified by the different viruses were compared. Analyses of the non-structural protein NV5 (P98 or NS5) suggested that WN and SLE were the most closely related pair of viruses, and that JE was the virus most distant from the other three. Analyses of the structural proteins C and E failed to show the close relationship between WN and SLE indicated by the NV5 results, but did suggest that NV5 was the most conserved and E the least conserved of the three proteins.