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ARS Home » Southeast Area » Athens, Georgia » U.S. National Poultry Research Center » Endemic Poultry Viral Diseases Research » Research » Publications at this Location » Publication #339318
Research Project: Intervention Strategies to Prevent and Control Enteric Diseases of Poultry

Location: Endemic Poultry Viral Diseases Research

Title: Investigating the Use of an Enterotropic Newcastle Disease Virus as a Recombinant Vaccine Platform Targeting Poultry Enteric Viruses

Author
item Day, James
item Yu, Qingzhong

Submitted to: Meeting Abstract
Publication Type: Abstract Only
Publication Acceptance Date: 5/1/2017
Publication Date: N/A
Citation: N/A

Interpretive Summary: No interpretive summary required.

Technical Abstract: Control strategies for poultry viral enteric disease must include vaccine platforms that have been specifically designed to improve flock performance, lessen disease severity, and reduce viral transmission. With the exception of certain autogenous vaccines, no vaccines currently exist to aid in the control and prevention of poultry enteric viral infections. Our targeted approach has been utilized to design recombinant vaccines using live poultry enterotropic viruses as expression vectors for specific disease-associated enteric viruses. Turkey enteric coronavirus (TCoV) causes enteritis in turkeys, resulting in economic losses to the turkey industry in the United States. TCoV does not readily grow in tissue culture, which hampers conventional vaccine development. To overcome this barrier to vaccine design, we have taken a novel approach using an enterotropic Newcastle disease virus (NDV) as a vector. Our current strategy to combat early viral infection in poultry is the development of this enterotropic vaccine platform to design efficacious vaccines to control enteric diseases of poultry. To this end, we have constructed infectious clones of an NDV vaccine strain expressing the major antigenic spike glycoproteins of a TCoV field strain initially detected in our laboratory using diagnostic high-throughput sequencing. The recombinant viruses, rV4/TCoV-S1 and rV4/TCoV-S2, were rescued using reverse genetics technology and the expression of the TCoV S1 and S2 spike glycoprotein subunits was confirmed in vitro, and their safety and stability was assessed in vivo. This serves as a proof-of-concept for the use of viral metagenomic data to inform the design of recombinant vaccines targeting specific enteric viruses associated with enteric disease in poultry.