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.

All animal procedures were conducted in accordance with the regulations of the Swiss Federal Committee on Animal Experimentation and with the Veterinary Office of the Canton Zurich (approval number: 70/2014). Six-to-eight-week-old naïve female BALB/c mice were i.m. inoculated at days 0 and for the first set of experiments at day 19 post-prime and for the second set of experiments 20 days post-prime with either the indicated HSV-1 amplicon vectors (10 6 TU per animal per dose) or HBSS. Five days after the prime immunization, mice were mated by adding one male to two females per cage. Since multiple blood sampling was done regularly over a period of about two weeks, only small blood samples (5-10 µL) were taken at each sampling via tail vein punctuation and collected using 20-µL microcaps capillary tubes (Sigma-Aldrich). Mice were milked as described previously [50] . Briefly, dams were separated from their offspring for about 2 h and then anesthetized. Oxytocin (100 µL of 10 IU/mL) was injected sub-cutaneous (s.c.) and milk flow was stimulated manually and collected using microcaps capillary tubes.