Genic amplification of the entire coding region of the HEF RNA segment of influenza C virus

In order to provide an easy and powerful analysis of influenza C viral HEF RNA segment of a recent strain, a combination of reverse transcription and the polymerase chain reaction was used. We amplified the entire coding region of the HEF gene of a laboratory strain of virus called C/Johannesburg/1/66, widely used for binding and esterase activity studies as well as that of a strain isolated in 1991 (C/Paris/145/91) from a patient suffering from severe flu syndrome. The sequences we amplified were about 2 kilobases long. In this work, we show that the forward ‘universal primer’ Unil, which has been used for influenza A and B viruses cDNA syntheses can also be used for influenza C virus. The PCR primers were designed to contain restriction sites to make the PCR products ready to be used for further purposes. A restriction analysis of the PCR products combined with analyses of all the human influenza C virus HEF gene sequences published so far permitted the design of sets of oligonucleotides which can prime PCR on cDNA of unknown influenza C virus for cloning.