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In spite of the success of the mumps vaccination, recent mumps outbreaks have been reported even among individuals with a history of mumps vaccination. For a better understanding of why the vaccination failed in cases of vaccinees who fell ill during recent mumps outbreaks, the immunological events during infection and/or vaccination should be better defined. In the work presented here we sought to identify new neutralization sites on the mumps virus surface glycoproteins. By using anti-mumps mAbs, three amino acid positions at residues 221, 323 and 373 in the F protein of mumps virus were shown to be located in at least two conformational neutralization epitopes. mAbs that specifically target these sites effectively neutralized mumps virus in vitro. The newly acquired glycosylation site at position 373 or loss of the existing one at position 323 was identified as the mechanism behind the escape from the specific mAbs. Based on the findings of this study, we suggest that the influence of the antigenic structure of the F protein should not be ignored in a thorough investigation of the underlying mechanism of the mumps vaccine failure or when making a strategy for development of a new vaccine.

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RNA viruses display the highest replication error rate in our biosphere, leading to highly diverse viral populations termed quasispecies. The gold standard method for detection and quantification of variants in a quasispecies is cloning and sequencing, but it is expensive, laborious and time consuming. Therefore, other mutation detection approaches, including SSCP, are often used. In this study, we demonstrate development and the usage of a CE-SSCP method for quantification of two nearly identical viral variants in heterogenic population of a mumps virus strain and its comparison to RFLP-CE-fragment length analysis (RFLP-CE-FLA). Analyzed PCR fragments were of the same size (245 bp) with one difference in their nucleotide sequence. The limit of detection of both methods was at 5% of the minor variant. When PCR amplicons of the two variants were pooled, methods' results were very similar. On the contrary, the quantification results of samples in which variants were mixed prior to PCR showed substantial difference between the two methods. Our results indicate that although both methods can be used for detection and monitoring of a specific mutation within a viral population, caution should be taken when quantitative analysis of complex samples is based solely on results of one method.

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