Rational engineering of recombinant picornavirus capsids to produce safe, protective vaccine antigen.

ABSTRACT: Foot-and-mouth disease remains a major plague of livestock and outbreaks are often economically catastrophic. Current inactivated virus vaccines require expensive high containment facilities for their production and maintenance of a cold-chain for their activity. We have addressed both of these major drawbacks. Firstly we have developed methods to efficiently express recombinant empty capsids. Expression constructs aimed at lowering the levels and activity of the viral protease required for the cleavage of the capsid protein precursor were used; this enabled the synthesis of empty A-serotype capsids in eukaryotic cells at levels potentially attractive to industry using both vaccinia virus and baculovirus driven expression. Secondly we have enhanced capsid stability by incorporating a ratio

SUBMITTER: Porta C 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3609824 | biostudies-literature | 2013 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature