Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
a subunit vaccine,
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the investigation of virus-cell interaction or
the identification of candidate receptors by using VLPs produced by
baculoviral vectors.
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In the HCV study, several groups have
described the generation of HCV-LPs in insect cells using recombi-
nant baculoviruses containing HCV structural genes.
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HCV-
LPs have shown to be effective for stimulating both cellular and
humoral immune responses
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and antigenic analyses revealed that
HCV-LPs interact with anti-HCV antibodies against nonlinear or
conformational epitopes of E1 or E2 proteins,
19,48,96
suggesting that
the HCV-LPs seem to resemble immunologically to HCV particles.
In addition, studies for interaction between HCV-LPs and host cells
revealed that HCV-LPs exhibited dose-dependent and saturable bind-
ing to lymphoma and hepatoma cell lines.
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Although cell
surface glycosaminoglycans (GAGs) are involved in the binding of
HCV-LPs as recombinant E2 proteins,
6
the binding activity to
hCD81 is different between HCV-LPs and the purified E2 pro-
teins,
107
suggesting that conformation of HCV envelope proteins is
important for the recognition of the cell surface binding molecules.
Therefore, HCV-LPs are useful not only for vaccine candidate but
also for a tool to examine the interaction between host cells and HCV.
Pseudotype Virus Systems for Characterization
of HCV Infection
A pseudotype virus defines as an enveloped viral particle harboring other
type of viral envelope proteins instead of its own envelopes which are not
coded into its viral genome.
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A pseudotype virus system based on
VSV have been established and applied as characterization of viral entry
mechanisms,
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neutralization test for antibodies,
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vaccine develop-
ment
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or identification of putative viral receptors
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for many viruses.
The most advantage of the use of this pseudotype virus system is to study
the entry mechanisms of many different viruses that are either difficult to
amplify in cultured cells or animals or that require high-level contain-
ment facilities, i.e. to handle with “biosafety level 4” viruses. In addition,
murine leukemia virus (MLV) or human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)
have also been engineered to establish pseudotype virus systems.
