Copyright © 2008 Pengyan et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. Inhibition of foot-and-mouth disease virus replication in vitro and in vivo by small interfering RNA Corresponding author. Wang Pengyan: wwwpy_322/at/163.com; Ren Yan: rycb1225/at/163.com; Guo Zhiru: guozhiru/at/yahoo.com; Chen Chuangfu: ccf-xb/at/163.com Received April 23, 2008; Accepted July 25, 2008. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. | ||||
Abstract By using bioinformatics computer programs, all foot-and-mouth disease virus (FMDV) genome sequences in public-domain databases were analyzed. Based on the results of homology analysis, 2 specific small interfering RNA (siRNA) targeting homogenous 3D and 2B1 regions of 7 serotypes of FMDV were prepared and 2 siRNA-expression vectors, pSi-FMD2 and pSi-FMD3, were constructed. The siRNA-expressing vectors were used to test the ability of siRNAs to inhibit virus replication in baby hamster kidney (BHK-21) cells and suckling mice, a commonly used small animal model. The results demonstrated that transfection of BHK-21 cells with siRNA-expressing plasmids significantly weakened the cytopathic effect (CPE). Moreover, BHK-21 cells transiently transfected with short hairpin RNA (shRNA)-expressing plasmids were specifically resistant to the infection of the FMDV serotypes A, O, and Asia I and this the antiviral effects persisted for almost 48 hours. We measured the viral titers, the 50% tissue culture infective dose (TCID50) in cells transfected with anti-FMDV siRNAs was found to be lower than that of the control cells. Furthermore, subcutaneous injection of siRNA-expressing plasmids in the neck of the suckling mice made them less susceptible to infection with O, and Asia I serotypes of FMDV. | ||||