LIMITED SEQUENCE DIVERGENCE OF HTLV-I OF INDIAN HAM TSP PATIENTS FROMA PROTOTYPE JAPANESE ISOLATE/

Nucleotide sequences of two HTLV-I proviruses isolated from Indian pat ients with HAM/TSP were analyzed. The sequence data of the env, pX, an d LTR regions showed 98-99% homologies with the prototype HTLV-I, ATK- 1, isolated from a Japanese ATL patient, indicating that HTLV-I isolat es in India and Japan are similar, with minor variations. However, cer tain small sequences of noncoding regions in the pX and LTR showed dif ferences of 6.1 and 7.2 %, respectively, thus the conclusion could var y depending on the regions and length of the sequences used for compar ison.