Detection of borna disease virus-reactive antibodies from patients with affective disorders by western immunoblot technique

High seroprevalence of Borna virus infection in schizophrenic patients, family members and mental health workers in Taiwan

“…The majority of the positive sera (64 of 70, 91.4%) recognized BDV p40 antigen, while only 5 of 70 (7.1%) recognized BDV p24 antigen, and only one serum recognized both BDV p40 and p24 antigens. These results are consistent with the studies of Fu et al 13 Sauder et al 15 and Bode,16 but discrepant from the study by Waltrip et al, 7 who reported more p24 seropositivity than p40 positivity. The reason for the discrepant results is unknown; one of the possible explanations is that our antigens are prokaryotic recombinant proteins, while other groups used native proteins.…”

“…In addition, we also found low titers of BDV antibodies in our positive plasma specimens, which are also consistent with the findings from other BDV serological studies in the literature. [12][13][14][15][16] Previous studies showed that the low dilution of sera from psychiatric patients may generate false positive reactions in BDV serological study due to non-specific binding of some autoantibodies or other unknown factors. 30,31 To increase the specificity of the Western blot analysis in detecting the BDV antibodies in our study, we use a novel prokaryotic expression system (IMPACT) to generate and to purify recombinant BDV antigens for Western blot analysis as described in the Methods section.…”

“…[7][8][9][10] Borna disease virus is a neurotropic, enveloped, negative-stranded RNA virus, which was first recog-nized as the infectious agent of an horse encephalitis endemic in eastern Germany. Several groups of researchers have demonstrated that patients with neuropsychiatric disorders have a higher rate of serum antibodies against BDV-specific nucleoprotein (40 kD, p40) and/or phosphoprotein (24 kD, p24), [11][12][13][14][15] suggesting that human neuropsychiatric disorders may be associated with BDV infection. 16 Further studies also revealed that psychiatric patients have a higher detection rate of BDV transcripts from peripheral blood 17,18 or postmortem brain tissue than controls, 19,20 adding further support to the important role of BDV infection in the pathogenesis of human psychiatric disorders.…”

Combined Effect of TLR2 Gene Polymorphism and Early Life Stress On the Age at Onset of Bipolar Disorders

“…Expressed both in the periphery and in the central nervous system (CNS) as well as in the maternal-fetal interface, they are able to initiate immediate immune responses against invading pathogens with potential implications in neuropathological processes [25][26][27]. This is of particular relevance since a variety of infectious agents viz Borna virus, Toxoplasma gondii, influenza or herpes simplex I have been associated with BD [28][29][30][31]. The currently assumed mechanism, common to these infectious insults in causing such risk, is defective central/systemic immune/inflammatory responses that interfere with expression of pro-inflammatory cytokines by microglia, the resident immune cells in the CNS known to express the full repertoire of TLRs [32].…”

Bornavirus immunopathogenesis in rodents: models for human neurological diseases

“…This wide host range suggests that humans are likely to be susceptible to BDV infection; however, there is no consensus concerning the role of BDV in human disease. Although some investigators report an increased prevalence of BDV infection in mood disorders and schizophrenia (Amsterdam et al, 1985;Bode et al, 1988Bode et al, , 1992Bode et al, , 1993Fu et al, 1993;Kishi et al, 1995;Waltrip II et al, 1995), others have not succeeded in replicating these ®ndings (Iwata et al, 1998;Kubo et al, 1997;Lieb et al, 1997;. Here we review two rodent models of BDV infection that provide insight into mechanisms by which neurotropic viruses may impact CNS development and function to effect complex disturbances in behavior.…”