Characteristics of Sindbis virus temperature-sensitive mutants in cultured BHK-21 and Aedes albopictus (Mosquito) cells.

A number of the temperature-sensitive mutants of Sindbis virus originally isolated and characterized by Burge and Pfefferkorn (1966, 1968) were reexamined for their abilities to grow and complement one another in cultured BHK-21 and Aedes albopictus (mosquito) cells. The response of the mutants to conditions of high and low temperature was similar in cultured cells of both the vertebrate and invertebrate hosts. Complementation experiments in BHK-21 cells produced growth patterns similar to those described by Burge and Pfefferkorn for chicken embryo fibroblast cells (1966) and placed the mutants into six nonoverlapping complementation groups. When examined in the cultured mosquito cells, only three of the nine mutants used in this study demonstrated complementation under a variety of experimental conditions. Homologous interference experiments demonstrated that the unusual patterns of complementation obtained in the A. albopictus cells did not result from an inefficient infection of the invertebrate cells by the mutants.