Source: Vincent ter Beek, Pig Progress, 19 August 2021, photo credit: EPR
By using genetic modification, researchers from the US Agricultural Research Service (ARS) have developed yet another experimental vaccine candidate offering protection against African Swine Fever virus.
The team is located at the Plum Island Animal Disease Center in New York state, part of the US Department of Agriculture. It has been hitting the news regularly over the last few years with the progress of the potential vaccine candidate called ASFV-G-ΔI177L in which 6 genes were deleted.
The new finding has to be seen in the context of studying the virus by systematically deleting genes and observe the effects on virulence. In an article in the peer-reviewed Journal of Virology, the team explained the new development as follows: “We report here that the deletion of the virus-specific ASFv gene ‘A137R’ from the highly virulent ASFv-Georgia2010 (ASFv-G) isolate induces a significant attenuation of virus virulence in swine.”
When deleting a gene, the variety that comes into existence is typically named by adding a Greek delta (Δ) prior to the part that is deleted.
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