1988 Volume 62 Issue 6 Pages 590-597
An analysis of nucleotide sequence of herpes simplex virus (HSV) DNA by restriction endonuclease digestion is being applied to epidemiologic studies. We examined basic characteristics of the DNA fingerprinting analyses, and observed that no two Japanese epidemiologically unrelated isolates yielded identical patterns of DNA fragments. This paper reports a comparison of restriction enzyme cleavage profiles of 224 isolates of HSV type 1 (HSV-1) from five regions in Japan. A variant with a characteristic Bfl II cleavage pattern was found. The variant was isolated at a much higher rate in the western regions than in the eastern regions of Japan. These results seem to suggest that there are some geographic differences among HSV isolates in Japan where migration of the people was very strictly controlled for a long time until a century ago. Thus, HSV variants may have occurred and accumulated in human populations, persisting through intimate personal contacts with the virus carriers.
