Transgenic shRNA pigs reduce susceptibility to foot and mouth disease virus infection
- Shihezi University, China
- Xinjiang Academy of Animal Science, China
- Jilin University, China
Abstract
Foot-and-mouth disease virus (FMDV) is an economically devastating viral disease leading to a substantial loss to the swine industry worldwide. A novel alternative strategy is to develop pigs that are genetically resistant to infection. Here, we produce transgenic (TG) pigs that constitutively expressed FMDV-specific siRNA derived from small hairpin RNA (shRNA). In vitro challenge of TG fibroblasts showed the shRNA suppressed viral growth. TG and non-transgenic (Non-TG) pigs were challenged by intramuscular injection with 100 LD50 of FMDV. High fever, severe clinical sign of FMD and typical histopathological changes were observed in all of the Non-TG pigs but in none of the high-siRNA pigs. Our results show that transgenic shRNA can provide a viable tool for producing animals with enhanced resistance to FMDV.
Article and author information
Author details
Reviewing Editor
- Stephen P Goff, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Columbia University, United States
Ethics
Animal experimentation: All experiments involving animals were conducted under the protocol approved by the Animal Care and Use Committee of Shihezi University (SU-ACUC-12031).
Version history
- Received: February 10, 2015
- Accepted: June 18, 2015
- Accepted Manuscript published: June 19, 2015 (version 1)
- Version of Record published: July 15, 2015 (version 2)
Copyright
© 2015, Hu et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
Metrics
-
- 2,101
- views
-
- 499
- downloads
-
- 33
- citations
Views, downloads and citations are aggregated across all versions of this paper published by eLife.
Download links
A two-part list of links to download the article, or parts of the article, in various formats.
Downloads (link to download the article as PDF)
Open citations (links to open the citations from this article in various online reference manager services)
Cite this article (links to download the citations from this article in formats compatible with various reference manager tools)
Transgenic shRNA pigs reduce susceptibility to foot and mouth disease virus infection
eLife 4:e06951.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.06951
Further reading
-
- Epidemiology and Global Health
- Microbiology and Infectious Disease
Systematically tracking and analysing reproductive loss in livestock helps with efforts to safeguard the health and productivity of food animals by identifying causes and high-risk areas.
