A tick-borne Langat virus mutant that is temperature sensitive and host range restricted in neuroblastoma cells and lacks neuroinvasiveness for immunodeficient mice.

ABSTRACT: Langat virus (LGT), the naturally attenuated member of the tick-borne encephalitis virus (TBEV) complex, was tested extensively in clinical trials as a live TBEV vaccine and was found to induce a protective, durable immune response; however, it retained a low residual neuroinvasiveness in mice and humans. In order to ablate or reduce this property, LGT mutants that produced a small plaque size or temperature-sensitive (ts) phenotype in Vero cells were generated using 5-fluorouracil. One of these ts mutants, clone E5-104, exhibited a more than 10(3)-fold reduction in replication at the permissive temperature in both mouse and human neuroblastoma cells and lacked detectable neuroinvasiveness for highly sensitive immunodeficient mice. The E5-104 mutant possessed five amino acid substitutions

SUBMITTER: Rumyantsev AA 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC1346960 | biostudies-literature | 2006 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature