Abstract
Rice stripe virus (RSV) particles in purified preparations were circular filaments and found to be composed of four components (nB, B, M2 and M1 in the order of rapid sedimentation) after several cycles of sucrose density gradient centrifugations. When nucleic acids extracts from the purified RSV were electrophoresed, four double stranded (ds-) RNAs and four single stranded (ss-) RNAs were obtained. The size of the ss-RNA (designated as ss-1 to 4 in the order of decreasing molecular weights) under nondenaturing condition was 3.1, 1.5, 1.2 and 1.0×106Mr, respectively, and that of ds-RNA (designated as ds-1 to 4 in order of decreasing molecular weights) under the same condition was 5.0, 2.8, 2.1 and 1.7×106Mr, respectively. The nB, B, M2 and M1 components contained ss-1 and ds-1, ss-2 and ds-2, ss-3 and ds-3, and ss-4 and ds-4, respectively. Comparison of the size of ss-RNA and denatured ds-RNA in each component, and hybridization analysis suggest that ss-RNAs are counterparts of ds-RNAs and that the RNAs associated with the four components are not subgenomic. Thus all components are associated with RSV. These results are almost similar to those reported on maize stripe virus except that the number of components of the two viruses are different, which confirms that the both viruses are related each other.
