Conservation of Antigenic Properties and Sequences Encoding the Envelope Proteins of Prototype Hantaan Virus and Two Virus Isolates from Korean Haemorrhagic Fever Patients

1 Virology Division, United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, Fort Detrick, Frederick, Maryland 21701-5011, U.S.A. and 2 Department of Microbiology, Korea University College of Medicine, Seoul, Korea Viruses isolated from the blood of two Korean haemorrhagic fever patients were propagated in cell culture and compared to prototype Hantaan virus which was isolated from Apodemus mice. The antigenic properties of the human isolates were found to be closely related to Hantaan virus by plaque reduction neutralization, haemagglutination inhibition and fluorescent antibody staining with both polyclonal and monoclonal antibodies. The medium genome segment of each human isolate was sequenced and compared to that of Hantaan virus. Nucleotides comprising the Hantaan virus G1 and G2 envelope protein-coding regions differed from those of the other viruses by only 5.4% and 5.7%. The human isolates differed from one another by 1.6%. The nucleotide differences resulted in predicted amino acid variations of 1.3% to 2.3% among the three viruses, with the majority occurring as conservative substitutions in G1. Keywords: haemorrhagic fever, Korean, Hantaan virus, HFRS Received 16 February 1988; accepted 25 April 1988.