Vero cells were seeded onto a 6-well culture plate at a concentration of 2 × 10 4 cells per well. Next day, medium was removed and the cells were washed with PBS. Then, 0.09 ml of diluted virus suspension and 0.01 ml of medium supplemented with typsin-EDTA containing an appropriate concentration of the antiviral compound were added. It was a ten-fold dilution scheme for each compound. The culture plates were incubated at 37°C in 5% CO 2 for 2 days, the cells were lysed with lysis buffer (TE buffer;10 mM Tris-HCl, pH 8.0, 100 mM NaCl, 10 mM EDTA, 0.5% SDS] and incubated for 10 min on ice, then centrifuged at 13,000 rpm for 30 min at 4°C. Cysolic DNA was extracted by phenol: chlororform (1:1) extraction of the supernatants. DNA was treated with 0.1 mg/ml Rnase A for 30 min at 37°C. The DNA was separated by agarose gel electrophoresis, and the DNA fragmentation was visualized from the digitized image of the gel as described [12] .