猪繁殖与呼吸综合征(porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome,PRRS)是世界养猪业的一个巨大的威胁。近年来,此病给各国养猪业造成了巨大的经济损失。本文立足于反向遗传操作技术,介绍了调控PRRS病毒粒子的感染性、基因组RNA复制、亚基因组mRNA转录以及翻译等重要过程的顺式调控元件的一级序列和高级结构的最新研究进展。
Porcine Reproductive and Respiratory Syndrome Virus (PRRSV), the causative agent of the ongoing "porcine high fever syndrome" in China, is capable of genetic and antigenic mutations at high fre- quency. How to design vaccine rationally to keep up with the ever-changing prevalent PRRSV variant is of great interest. We developed an infectious cDNA clone of an attenuated strain of Type II PRRSV, and further manipulated the infectious cDNA clone by inserting polylinker between ORF1 and ORF2, en- coding for nonstructural- or structural-protein, respectively. The cDNA was generated from the cell-attenuated virus strain, APRRS, via RT-PCR, and followed by nucleotide sequencing and molecular cloning. The full-length of the APRRS genomic RNA was determined as 15521 nucleotides in length excluding poly(A) tail, which has a 99.7% nucleotide identity with that of PRRSV Nsp strain, also a vac- cine strain. Based on the nucleotide sequencing results, the full-length cDNA clone was assembled in pBlueScript vector, under the control of T7 promoter at the immediate 5′ terminus of genome. To dis- cern the rescued viruses from that of parental virus, a Mlu I restriction site was engineered into ORF5 coding region. Upon transfection of the in vitro transcripts of both the original and Mlu I-tagged cDNAs into MA-104 cells, typical PRRSV cytopathic effects were observed. The rescued viruses from the full-length cDNA clones displayed the same virological and molecular properties. Subsequently, PCR-based mutagenesis was conducted to separate the coding regions between PRRSV nonstructural genes, ORF1, and structural proteins, ORF2-ORF7. The synthetic RNA of such mutant clone, pCSA, was infectious and the rescued virus shared similar properties with that of the parental virus. This study provided a valuable tool for development of chimeric PRRSV as vaccine candidate offering cross-protection to various genetically diversified PRRSV strains, and a platform for further develop- ment of PRRSV as a gene expression vector for recombinant vac
YUAN ShiShan & WEI ZuZhang Department of Animal Infectious Diseases, Key Laboratory of Animal Parasitology Chinese Ministry of Agriculture, Shanghai Vet- erinary Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Shanghai 200232, China
