RESUMEN
Inactivated purified whole virus vaccines are used for control of foot and mouth disease (FMD). ELISAs detecting antibodies to the nonstructural proteins (NSP), a marker of infection, are primarily used to differentiate FMD virus (FMDV) infected from vaccinated animals (DIVA). However, such DIVA assays have a limitation to their specificity since residual NSPs present in the relatively impure vaccines are suspected to induce an NSP-antibody response in the repeatedly vaccinated animals. Epitope-deleted negative marker vaccine strategy seems to have an advantage over the conventional vaccines in identifying the infected animals with accuracy. NSP 3AB contains an abundance of immunodominant B-cell epitopes of diagnostic importance. This study addresses the feasibility of producing 3AB-truncated FMDV mutant as a potential negative marker vaccine candidate. An infectious cDNA clone of FMDV serotype Asia 1 strain was used to engineer an array of deletion mutations in the established antigenic domain of 3AB. The maximum length of deletion tolerated by the virus was found to be restricted to amino acid residues 87-144 in the C-terminal half of 3A protein along with deletion of the first two copies of 3B peptide. The 3AB-truncated marker virus (Asia 1 IND 491/1997Δ3A87-1443B1,2+FLAG) demonstrated infectivity titres comparable to that of the parental virus in BHK-21 (log10 7.42 TCID50/ml) and LFBK-αVß6 (log10 8.30 TCID50/ml) cell monolayer culture. The protein fragment corresponding to the viable deletion in the 3AB region was expressed in a prokaryotic system to standardize a companion assay (3A87-1533B1,2 I-ELISA) for the negative marker virus which showed reasonably high diagnostic sensitivity (96.9%) and specificity (100% for naïve and 97.1% for uninfected vaccinated samples). The marker virus and its companion ELISA designed in this study provide a basis to devise a marker vaccine strategy for FMD control.