Nervous necrosis virus (NNV), also known as betanodavirus, has been recently implicated in mass mortalities of cultured marine fish. An effective vaccine is urgently needed to protect fish against this virus. However, parenteral immunization methods are very stressful. Individual immunization for thousands of fish is very labor intensive and expensive. Therefore, we expressed NNV coat protein i...

Here we report on the conformational changes that are responsible for the appearance of the Dicentrarchus labrax encephalitis virus (DlEV) coat protein as a doublet in SDS-PAGE. Wild-type and mutated forms of the coat protein cDNA were expressed in E. coli. The study of the resulting recombinant molecules excluded the possibility of the involvement of a precursor autocatalysis mechanism or a ri...

Betanodaviruses, the causal agents of viral nervous necrosis in marine fish, have bipartite, positive-sense RNA genomes. As their genomes are the smallest and simplest among viruses, betanodaviruses have been studied in detail as model viruses by using a genetic-engineering system, as has occurred with the insect alphanodaviruses, the other members of the family Nodaviridae. However, studies of...