Identification of a Peptide Produced by Bifidobacterium longum CECT 7210 with Antirotaviral Activity

Chenoll, Empar; Casinos, Beatriz; Bataller, Esther; Buesa, Javier; Ramón, Daniel; Genovés, Salvador; Fábrega, Joan; Rivero Urgell, Montserrat; Moreno Muñoz, José A.

Group A rotavirus is one of the major causes of acute gastroenteritis in infants and young children, leading to an estimated 2 million hospitalizations per year (Parashar et al., 2006) . Despite the administration of rotavirus vaccines, rotavirus still accounts for an estimated 21.3-39.5% of the hospital admissions for diarrheal disease in Europe (Williams et al., 2009) . However, hospitalizations of older children and adults for diarrhea have greatly decreased after the introduction of infant rotavirus vaccination, which suggests that some rotavirus episodes were transmitted from infants (Lopman et al., 2011) . Rotaviruses are transmitted by the fecal-oral route, inducing diarrhea due to malabsorption by the infected epithelial cells of the intestinal mucosa (Kapikian et al., 2001) and increased intestinal motility (Istrate et al., 2014) . The mechanisms underlying diarrhea include secondary malabsorption, patchy lesions, villous atrophy, and disruption of the tight junctions in the small intestine, altered ion channel transport due to the secretion of neurotransmitters (Hagbom et al., 2012) , NSP4 toxicity (Hodges and Gill, 2010) , the activation of the enteric nervous system (Lundgren et al., 2000) , and the expression of aquaporins (Cao et al., 2014) . The process is characterized by profuse diarrhea, which can cause severe dehydration and, in the case of non-intervention, lead to death (Parashar et al., 2006) . Several vaccines have been developed, demonstrating different degrees of protection against rotavirus infection (Vesikari et al., 2007; Dennehy, 2008; Glass et al., 2014) . Nevertheless, it has been reported that despite wide coverage, the antibodies induced by vaccination cannot totally prevent symptomatic infections of some rotavirus genotypes (Bucardo et al., 2015) . These findings imply that new generation vaccines and complementary preventive approaches are needed to decrease the morbidity and mortality associated with rotavirus diarrhea (Demirjian and Levy, 2009; Glass et al., 2014) .