African Swine Fever Vaccines: Development and Application

A special issue of Microbiology Research (ISSN 2036-7481).

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 May 2024) | Viewed by 1441

Special Issue Editors


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Guest Editor
Department of Pathobiology, College of Veterinary Medicine, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, IL, USA
Interests: molecular mechanisms of viral virulence; host range and immunomodulation; ASFV vaccine design and development
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Guest Editor
Federal Research Center for Virology and Microbiology (FRCVM), Volginsky, Russia
Interests: molecular epidemiology; transboundary animal diseases
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Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

African swine fever (ASF) is an acute viral hemorrhagic disease of domestic swine, with mortality rates approaching 100%. Devastating ASF outbreaks and continuing epidemics, starting in the Caucasus region and persisting in the Russian Federation, Europe, China, and other parts of Southeast Asia (2007 to date) highlight its significance. ASF strain Georgia-07 and its derivatives are now endemic in extensive regions of Europe and Asia and are “out of Africa” forever, a situation that poses a grave, if not existential, threat to the swine industry worldwide. Although the current concern is Georgia-07, other emerging ASFV strains may threaten the industry in the indefinite future. ASF’s potential to spread and become endemic in new regions, its rapid and efficient transmission among pigs, and the relative stability of the causative agent ASF virus (ASFV) in the environment all provide significant challenges for disease control. Effective and robust methods, including vaccines for ASF response and recovery, are urgently needed. Despite the continual ASF threat and the fact that the disease was first described by Montgomery in 1921, it is surprising that very few ASF vaccines are available and even existing vaccines require confirmation of their safety and efficacy in the field.

Current data indicate that ASF vaccines could indeed be developed, because pigs surviving acute ASFV infection develop long-term resistance to homologous virus challenge but rarely to heterologous virus challenge. Vaccine development has been hindered by large gaps in knowledge concerning aspects of ASFV infection and immunity, including the following: viral pathogenesis and persistence, viral determinants of virulence and host range, critical host protective responses, the extent of ASFV strain variation in nature and its impact on cross protection, and the ASFV proteins (protective antigens (Pas)) responsible for inducing protective host responses.

Exciting research progress addressing aspects of these knowledge gaps is being made. This Special Issues of Microbiology Research will provide a scientific forum for the presentation and discussion of original research reports, focused topical reviews and opinion articles on these critical vaccine-development and field application questions.

Dr. Daniel L. Rock
Dr. Denis Kolbasov
Guest Editors

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Keywords

  • African swine fever
  • vaccines
  • virulence
  • protection

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Published Papers (1 paper)

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Research

19 pages, 1403 KiB  
Article
Replication Kinetics and Infectivity of African Swine Fever Virus (ASFV) Variants with Different Genotypes or Levels of Virulence in Cell Culture Models of Primary Porcine Macrophages
by Brecht Droesbeke, Nadège Balmelle, Ann Brigitte Cay, Shaojie Han, Dayoung Oh, Hans J. Nauwynck and Marylène Tignon
Microbiol. Res. 2024, 15(3), 1690-1708; https://doi.org/10.3390/microbiolres15030112 - 29 Aug 2024
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Abstract
African Swine Fever (ASF) is a devastating viral hemorrhagic disease that causes high morbidity and mortality in domestic pigs and wild boars, severely impacting the swine industry. The etiologic agent, African Swine Fever virus (ASFV), mainly infects myeloid cells of the swine mononuclear [...] Read more.
African Swine Fever (ASF) is a devastating viral hemorrhagic disease that causes high morbidity and mortality in domestic pigs and wild boars, severely impacting the swine industry. The etiologic agent, African Swine Fever virus (ASFV), mainly infects myeloid cells of the swine mononuclear phagocytic system (MPS). For other porcine viruses, in vitro culture models with primary cells are widely used as they mimic the in vivo viral replication behavior better compared to continuous cell lines. Our study validates this possible correlation for ASFV using cell culture models established for three different porcine macrophages, isolated from the lungs (porcine alveolar macrophages), blood (monocyte-derived macrophages) and spleen (spleen macrophages). The cells were infected with two genotype I and two genotype II strains with different pathogenic potential in vivo. The highly virulent strains replicated better in general than the low-virulent strains. This was most pronounced in monocyte-derived macrophages, although only statistically significant 18 h post-infection (hpi) in the intracellular genomic ASFV copies between E70 and the low-virulent strains. For this reason, we conclude that the different replication characteristics between the strains with different virulence do not proportionally represent the differences in pathology seen between the strains in vivo. Additionally, ASFV-positive cells were observed earlier in monocyte-derived macrophages (MDMs) compared to the alveolar and spleen macrophages, subsequently leading to an earlier rise in extracellular virus, and, ultimately, more MDMs were infected at the end of sampling. For these reasons, we propose MDMs as the best-suited cell type to study ASFV. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue African Swine Fever Vaccines: Development and Application)
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