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Nucleotide Phosphohydrolase in Purified Vaccinia Virus

Viral Oncology Section, Roswell Park Memorial Institute, Buffalo, New York 14203

ABSTRACT

Purified infectious vaccinia virus has been shown to contain an enzyme or enzymes that remove the terminal phosphate group from adenosine triphosphate (ATP), guanosine triphosphate (GTP), uridine triphosphate (UTP), and cytidine triphosphate (CTP). The K_m for ATP of this enzyme is 5.5 x 10^–4M, and the relative rates of the reaction with ATP, GTP, UTP, and CTP are 1.00, 0.34, 0.15, and 0.29, respectively. The virus enzyme does not react with any of the diphosphates. The rate of the reaction is proportional to the amount of virus added and is linear for 130 min. The virus nucleotide phosphohydrolase activity is greatly stimulated by Mg⁺⁺ and very slightly stimulated by Ca⁺⁺. The small residual activity observed in the absence of divalent cations is completely inhibited by ethylenediaminetetraacetic acid. Neither Na⁺ nor K⁺ ions, nor any mixture of these, was found to stimulate the reaction significantly, and ouabain, at 10^–4M, inhibited the reaction by only 27%. The response of the vaccinia enzyme to mono- and divalent cations and to ouabain indicates that the vaccinia enzyme has different properties from those associated with microsomes and mitochondria.