Transfer of Anti-Rotavirus Antibodies during Pregnancy and in Milk Following Maternal Vaccination with a Herpes Simplex Virus Type-1 Amplicon Vector

Meier, Anita F.; Suter, Mark; Schraner, Elisabeth M.; Humbel, Bruno M.; Tobler, Kurt; Ackermann, Mathias; Laimbacher, Andrea S.

Previous work showed that VP7 might play a key role in passive protection of pups from RV-induced diarrhea [27] . Based on the results from the immune fluorescence analysis of the mice sera, we were able to raise VP2-and VP6-specific antibodies in the blood of sWa[VP2/6/7] vaccinated dams, but no VP7-specific antibodies. The use of HSV-1 amplicon vectors to launch the in situ production of RVLPs provides the advantage that as opposed to injection of purified VLPs, the delivery of VLP encoding genes into host cells results in the intracellular production of antigens. In our case, we expected the formation of triple-layered RVLPs. Therefore, we further characterized the nature of our antigen used for vaccination. In a first step, RVLPs formed upon transduction of sWa[VP2/6/7] gene expression cassettes was analyzed using electron microscopy ( Figure 5A,B) and in a second step, the composition of purified particles was examined using Western blot analysis ( Figure 5C ). Negative staining transmission electron microscopy of the purified cell lysates from