Official websites use. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites. Elizabeth Vuono and Elizabeth Ramirez-Medina equally contributed to the results presented in this report. Author order was determined by flipping a coin.
All Rights Reserved. African swine fever virus ASFV is the etiological agent of African swine fever ASF , a devastating disease affecting domestic and wild swine and currently causing a global pandemic, severely affecting swine production.
The surviving animals presented protracted viremias with lower virus titers compared with those of animals inoculated with the parental virus, and all of them developed a strong virus-specific antibody response. This report constitutes the first evidence that the HR gene is involved in ASFV virulence in swine and that the deletion of this gene may be used as a tool to increase the attenuation of currently experimental vaccines to improve their safety profiles. We present here the discovery of a novel virus determinant of virulence, the HR gene, which, when deleted from the ASFV-G genome, significantly reduces virus virulence in domestic swine.
African swine fever ASF is a devastating disease of swine present in more than 20 sub-Saharan African countries and currently being considered a pandemic affecting countries in a large contiguous geographical area from Central Europe to East and Southeast Asia.
In the last months, the disease was also detected in the Dominican Republic and Haiti after more than 50 years of being absent from the Western hemisphere. This situation is causing significant economic losses in the pig industry and a shortage in food availability in the affected countries. ASFV is a large and structurally complex virus, presenting a double envelope and harboring a large to kbp , double-stranded DNA genome 2 , encoding approximately to genes.
