The open reading frame of a Brazilian bovine viral diarrhea virus (BVDV) strain, IBSP4ncp, was recombined with the untranslated regions of the reference NADL strain by homologous recombination in Saccharomyces cerevisiae, resulting in chimeric full-length cDNA clones of BVDV (chi-NADL/IBSP4ncp#2 and chi-NADL/IBSP4ncp#3). The recombinant clones were successfully recovered, resulting in viable viruses, having the kinetics of replication, focus size, and morphology similar to those of the parental virus, IBSP4ncp. In addition, the chimeric viruses remained stable for at least 10 passages in cell culture, maintaining their replication efficiency unaltered. Nucleotide sequencing revealed a few point mutations; nevertheless, the phenotype of the rescued viruses was nearly identical to that of the parental virus in all experiments. Thus, genetic stability of the chimeric clones and their phenotypic similarity to the parental virus confirm the ability of the yeast-based homologous recombination to maintain characteristics of the parental virus from which the recombinant viruses were derived. The data also support possible use of the yeast system for the manipulation of the BVDV genome.
Full-length dengue virus (DENV) cDNA clones are an invaluable tool for many studies,
including those on the development of attenuated or chimeric vaccines and on
host-virus interactions. Furthermore, the importance of low passage DENV infectious
clones should be highlighted, as these may harbour critical and unique
strain-specific viral components from field-circulating isolates. The successful
construction of a functional Brazilian low passage DENV serotype 2 full-length clone
through homologous recombination reported here supports the use of a strategy that
has been shown to be highly useful by our group for the development of flavivirus
infectious clones and replicons.
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