Award details

Roles of the leader and trailer regions of rinderpest virus in determining pathogenicity

Reference	BBS/E/I/00000729
Principal Investigator / Supervisor	Professor Thomas Barrett
Co-Investigators / Co-Supervisors
Institution	The Pirbright Institute
Department	The Pirbright Institute Department
Funding type	Research
Value (£)	58,950
Status	Completed
Type	Institute Project
Start date	01/10/1999
End date	30/09/2002
Duration	36 months

Abstract

Rinderpest virus causes a major economic disease of cattle in parts of Asia and Africa and can also have devastating effects on wildlife susceptible populations. Although, like the closely related measles virus, there is only one serotype of the virus, different strains exhibit different pathogenicity in the host species. In recent years technology has been developed to enable DNA copies of negative strand virus genomes to be rescued as live virus. This has allowed direct mutagenesis of virus genes to be carried out and then given us the potential to study the function(s) of particular virus genes in great detail. The RPV genome RNA is 15,882 nucleotides in length and consists of a short 3' leader RNA followed by the coding regions for the six structural protein genes, with defined stop-start sequence motifs between each gene, and ends in a short 5' trailer RNA. Studies recently carried out in our laboratory using a virus minigenome carrying a CAT reporter gene identified several nucleotides in the leader region of the virus genome which have varying effects on the replicative ability of the minigenome. The present project aims to create a full-length copy of a virulent virus genome to determine firstly if the rescued virus is also highly pathogenic and secondly to study the effect(s) that changes in the leader and trailer regions of the genome have on virus pathogenesis.

Summary

unavailable

Committee	Closed Committee - Animal Sciences (AS)
Research Topics	X – not assigned to a current Research Topic
Research Priority	X – Research Priority information not available
Research Initiative	X - not in an Initiative
Funding Scheme	X – not Funded via a specific Funding Scheme

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