Characterization of two BHV-4 strains isolated in the Czech Republic

This study describes the isolation of bovine herpesvirus 4 (BHV-4) from the respiratory tract of animals suffering from respiratory disease. DNA of new isolates, CH and Ni, was cleaved with BamHI, EcoRI and HindIII in restriction enzyme analysis and the fragments were identified by co-migration with the restriction profile of the reference strain Movar 33/63 cleaved with the appropriate endonuclease. Typical profiles with polyrepeti-tive DNA (prDNA) fragments were detected. In order to localize the size variation within the obtained digestion fragments, Southern blot hybridization was performed. Differences between the isolates CH, Ni were localized in both the prDNAs and the unique central part of the genome and were restricted to fragment size variation.