Wenting Jiang

Objectives: Infectious bursal disease virus (IBDV) is a highly contagious, acutely infectious agent that causes immunosuppression in chickens. We expressed IBDV VP2 proteins in Escherichia coli (E. coli) to develop an effective virus-like-particles (VLPs) vaccine and evaluated its immunogenicity. Methods: The VLPs produced in E. coli were used as an immunogen mixed with a water-in-mineral-oil adjuvant (Montanide^TM ISA 71 VG, ISA 71 RVG) or a white oil (7#) adjuvant. VLPs without an adjuvant, commercial subunit vaccine, inactivated vaccine, and attenuated vaccine were used as controls. These test vaccines were intramuscularly injected into 19-day-old SPF chickens, which were challenged with the IBDV virulent strain at 30 days after vaccination. Results: The adjuvants boosted antibody production, and the adjuvant groups (except white oil) produced higher antibody levels than the non-adjuvanted controls and the commercial vaccine groups. In terms of cellular immunity, the VLPs plus adjuvant combinations produced higher levels of cytokines, IL-2, IL-4, and IFN-γ than the controls. Conclusion: IBDV VLPs plus the ISA 71 RVG adjuvant can be used as an optimal vaccine combination for improving the immune efficacy of IBD subunit vaccines, which can protect against the virulent strain.

African swine fever virus (ASFV) is a highly infectious viral pathogen that endangers the global pig industry, and no effective vaccine is available thus far. The CD2v protein is a glycoprotein on the outer envelope of ASFV, which mediates the transmission of the virus in the blood and recognition of the virus serotype, playing an important role in ASFV vaccine development and disease prevention. Here, we generated two specific monoclonal antibodies (mAbs), 6C11 and 8F12 (subtype IgG1/kappa-type), against the ASFV CD2v extracellular domain (CD2v-ex, GenBank: MK128995.1, 1–588 bp) and characterized their specificity. Peptide scanning technology was used to identify the epitopes recognized by mAbs 6C11 and 8F12. As a result, two novel B cell epitopes, ³⁸DINGVSWN⁴⁵ and ¹³⁴GTNTNIY¹⁴⁰, were defined. Amino acid sequence alignment showed that the defined epitopes were conserved in all referenced ASFV strains from various regions of China including the highly pathogenic, epidemic strain, Georgia2007/1 (NC_044959.2), with the same noted substitutions compared to the four foreign ASFV wild-type strains. This study provides important reference values for the design and development of an ASFV vaccine and useful biological materials for the functional study of the CD2v protein by deletion analysis.