ABSTRACT
Recent studies suggest that hepatitis B virus (HBV), despite being a DNA virus, replicates via an RNA intermediate (R. H. Miller, P. L. Marion, and S. W. Robinson, Virology 139:64-72, 1984; J. Summers and W. S. Mason, Cell 29:403-415, 1982). The HBV life cycle is therefore a permuted version of the RNA retroviral life cycle. Sequence homology between retroviral reverse transcriptase and the putative HBV polymerase gene product suggests the presence of an HBV reverse transcriptase (H. Toh, H. Hajashida, and T. Miyata, Nature (London) 305:827-829, 1983). As yet, there has been no direct evidence that reverse transcriptase activity is present in the viral particle. We used activity gel analysis to detect the in situ catalytic activities of DNA polymerases after sodium dodecyl sulfate-polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis. Our studies demonstrated that HBV-like particles secreted by a differentiated human hepatoma cell line transfected with genomic HBV DNA contain two major polymerase activities which migrate as approximately 90- and approximately 70-kilodalton (kDa) proteins. This demonstrated, for the first time, that HBV-like particles contain a novel DNA polymerase-reverse transcriptase activity. Furthermore, we propose that the 70-kDa reverse transcriptase may be produced by proteolytic self-cleavage of the 90-kDa precursor protein.
