African horse sickness virus (AHSV) causes the disease African horse sickness in susceptible equids, and is of great economic importance in South Africa. AHSV has a segmented dsRNA genome, with each of the 10 segments encoding at least one virus protein, resulting in a total of seven structural and four non-structural proteins being synthesized upon infection. Bioinformatics analysis of the genome of AHSV and the related bluetongue virus (BTV) revealed the presence of an additional overlapping out-of-frame open reading frame (ORF) on segment 9, which is known to code for the viral structural protein VP6. This ORF was shown to encode a novel non-structural protein, designated NS4.
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