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Heliothis virescens ascovirus 3a (HvAV-3a), a member of the family Ascoviridae, has the highest diversity among ascovirus spe-cies that have been reported in Australia, Indonesia, China, and the United States. To understand the diversity and origin of this important ascovirus, the complete genome of the HvAV Indonesia strain (HvAV-3g), isolated from Spodoptera exigua, was de-termined to be 199,721 bp, with a G+C content of 45.9%. Therefore, HvAV-3g has the largest genome among the reported asco-virus genomes to date. There are 194 predicted open reading frames (ORFs) encoding proteins of 50 or more amino acid resi-dues. In comparison to HvAV-3e reported from Australia, HvAV-3g has all the ORFs in HvAV-3e with 6 additional ORFs unique to HvAV-3g, including 1 peptidase C26 gene with the highest identity to Drosophila spp. and 2 gas vesicle protein U (GvpU) genes with identities to Bacillus megaterium. The five unique homologous regions (hrs) and 25 baculovirus repeat ORFs (bro) of HvAV-3g are highly variable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]