Repetitive nucleotide sequencing of a dispensable DNA segment in a clonal population of African swine fever virus

Abstract Repetitive nucleotide sequencing of a dispensable genomic segment of a clonal population of African swine fever (ASF) virus has been carried out to estimate the mutant frequency to neutral alleles. Since no mutations have been detected in a total of 54026 nucleotides screened, the maximum mutant frequency is 5.5 × 10 −5 substitutions/nucleotide (95% confidence level). The result renders very unlikely the occurrence of hypermutational events during ASF virus DNA replication, at least within the selected DNA fragment.