The trade of livestock or their products between nations requires information on the risk of introducing infectious agents such as foot and mouth disease virus (FMDV). Although transmission pathways for FMDV vary, a recent concern in the United States (USA) is that it might enter via cloned embryos. A quantitative risk assessment model was developed to determine the scenarios (with mathematical...

Cell surface molecules that can act as virus receptors may exert an important selective pressure on RNA viral quasispecies. Large population passages of foot-and-mouth disease virus (FMDV) in cell culture select for mutant viruses that render dispensable a highly conserved Arg-Gly-Asp (RGD) motif responsible for integrin receptor recognition. Here, we provide evidence that viability of recombin...

Repeated bottleneck passages of RNA viruses result in accumulation of mutations and fitness decrease. Here, we show that clones of foot-and-mouth disease virus (FMDV) subjected to bottleneck passages, in the form of plaque-to-plaque transfers in BHK-21 cells, increased the thermosensitivity of the viral clones. By constructing infectious FMDV clones, we have identified the amino acid substituti...

doi:10.4102/ojvr.v81i2.723 http://www.ojvr.org Screening for foot-and-mouth disease virus in livestockwildlife interface areas of Tanzania Authors: Emma Peter1 Christopher J. Kasanga1 Raphael Sallu2 Mkama Mathias2 Mmeta Yongolo2 Misheck Mulumba3 Ezekia Ranga4 Philemon N. Wambura1 Mark M. Rweyemamu1 Affiliations: 1Southern African Centre for Infectious Disease Surveillance, Sokoine University of...

We constructed foot-and-mouth disease virus (FMDV) mutants bearing independent deletions of the two stem-loop structures predicted in the 3' noncoding region of viral RNA, SL1 and SL2, respectively. Deletion of SL2 was lethal for viral infectivity in cultured cells, while deletion of SL1 resulted in viruses with slower growth kinetics and downregulated replication associated with impaired negat...

The prototypic foot-and-mouth disease virus (FMDV) was shown more than a century ago to be the first filterable agent capable of causing FMD, and it has served as an important model for studying basic principles of Aphthovirus molecular biology. However, the complex structure and antigenic diversity of FMDV have posed a major obstacle to the attempts at manipulating the infectious virus by reve...

Foot-and-mouth disease virus (FMDV) is known to employ the conserved Arg-Gly-Asp (RGD) tripeptide located on the variable betaG-betaH loop of the VP1 capsid protein for binding to cells. Coxsackievirus A9 (CAV9) also carries an RGD sequence, but on a short C-terminal extension of its VP1 and in a different amino acid context. This apparent relationship raised the question of whether insertion o...

The effect of combinations of the mutagenic base analog 5-fluorouracil (FU) and the antiviral inhibitors guanidine hydrochloride (G) and heparin (H) on the infectivity of foot-and-mouth disease virus (FMDV) in cell culture has been investigated. Related FMDV clones differing up to 10(6)-fold in relative fitness in BHK-21 cells have been compared. Systematic extinction of intermediate fitness vi...

Infection of cells with picornaviruses can lead to a block in protein secretion. For poliovirus this is achieved by the 3A protein, and the consequent reduction in secretion of proinflammatory cytokines and surface expression of major histocompatibility complex class I proteins may inhibit host immune responses in vivo. Foot-and-mouth disease virus (FMDV), another picornavirus, can cause persis...

Foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) is a highly contagious and economically devastating disease of cloven-hoofed animals in the world. The disease can be effectively controlled by vaccination of susceptible animals with the conventional inactivated vaccine. However, one major concern of the inactivated FMD virus (FMDV) vaccine is that it does not allow serological discrimination between infected and v...