Year: 2006
Type: dissertation
Abstract: Jembrana disease is an acute and severe disease of Bali cattle (Bos javanicus) endemic in Indonesia that is caused by a bovine lentivirus designated Jembrana disease virus (JDV).Previous studies have demonstrated that it is possible to induce a protective immunity against the disease by immunisation with a crude whole virus vaccine prepared from the tissues of infected cattle.This vaccine has been demonstrated to ameliorate the clinical signs of disease resulting from exposure to virus infection but a safer vaccine amenable to commercial production techniques is required.JDV, like all lentiviruses, encodes a transcriptional trans-activator Tat protein that is encoded from one or both of two exons of the tat gene.Tat is particularly essential for virus replication and it was hypothesised that the induction of an immune response in cattle against JDV Tat may effect protection against virus infection.Investigations were therefore conducted on JDV Tat to provide basic information on the protein that would enable it to be further investigated as a potential immunogen for incorporation into vaccines for the control of Jembrana disease.Analysis of tat transcripts obtained from tissues of cattle infected with three strains of JDV suggested that, during the acute clinical disease, Tat produced at this stage of the disease process was translated from the first coding exon only.Nucleotide variation in this exon, which would have translated into amino acid variations in the Tat protein, was evident especially between strains from geographically different regions of Indonesia.There was; however, conservation of the essential functional domains of cysteine-rich, core and basic regions, which suggested immunity to a single Tat protein might protect against infection by heterologous strains.Subsequent studies on Tat reported in the thesis therefore concentrated on the protein encoded by tat exon 1 of a single strain of JDV.
Author: Surachmi Setiyaningsih
Language: English
Subfield: Animal Science and Zoology
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W1537257805