Ganciclovir (GCV) and acyclovir (ACV) are guanine nucleoside analogues that inhibit lytic herpesvirus replication. GCV and ACV must be monophosphorylated by virally encoded enzymes to be converted into nucleotides and incorporated into viral DNA. However, whether GCV and/or ACV phosphorylation in EpsteinBarr virus (EBV)-infected cells is mediated primarily by the EBV-encoded protein kinase (EBV-PK), the EBV-encoded thymidine kinase (EBV-TK), or both is controversial. To examine this question, we constructed EBV mutants containing stop codons in either the EBV-PK or EBV-TK open reading frame and selected for stable 293T clones latently infected with wild-type EBV or each of the mutant viruses. Cells were induced to the lytic form of viral replication with a BZLF1 expression vector in the presence and absence of various doses of GCV and ACV, and infectious viral titers were determined by a green Raji cell assay. As expected, virus production in wild-type EBV-infected Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) is a human herpesvirus that causes infectious mononucleosis and is associated with a variety of different human tumors (1,47,81). Like all herpesviruses, EBV can infect cells in either the latent or lytic form (13). The lytic form of infection is required for horizontal spread of the virus from cell to cell and from host to host. During the lytic form of viral replication, EBV uses a virally encoded DNA polymerase and the oriLyt replication origin to duplicate its genome (24, 36, 51). The lytic form of EBV replication can be effectively inhibited in vitro by the guanine nucleoside analogues, acyclovir (ACV) and ganciclovir (GCV) (11,16,50,56). Since acyclovir is significantly less toxic than ganciclovir in patients, acyclovir is generally used to treat diseases associated with lytic EBV infection, such as oral hairy leukoplakia (3).GCV and ACV cannot be incorporated into viral or cellular DNA unless they are phosphorylated and converted into nucleotides (17,29). Work in other herpesvirus systems has demonstrated that the first step in GCV or ACV phosphorylation is not performed efficiently by cellular nucleoside kinases but can be carried out by virally encoded enzymes in cells infected with various herpesviruses (6,17,20,25,29,75). Human herpes simplex virus 1 (HSV-1) and HSV-2 encode a viral thymidine kinase (TK) which mediates the first step in GCV and ACV phosphorylation in virally infected cells (20,21,73), and ACV-and GCV-resistant HSV mutants isolated from patients commonly have mutations in the viral thymidine kinase gene (5,14,46,64) and less commonly within the viral DNA polymerase gene (61). In contrast, the human cytomegalovirus (HCMV) does not encode a viral thymidine kinase protein.Instead, in HCMV-infected cells, the virally encoded protein kinase (UL97) mediates the first step of GCV phosphorylation (53, 75) and (albeit much less efficiently) ACV phosphorylation (76). Once made, the triphosphorylated form of ACV (and to a lesser extent GCV) is a much better substrate for herpesvirus-encoded DNA polymerases than...