Construction of stabilized and tagged foot-and-mouth disease virus

Foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) is a highly contagious and economically devastating disease that affects cloven-hoofed animals worldwide. Construction and purification of stable antigen for vaccine are necessary but technically difficult and laborious. Here, we have tried to investigate an alternative method by inserting a hexa-histidine tag (6xHIS) in the VP1 C-terminal for easy purification and replacing two amino acids of VP1/VP2 to enhance the stability of the capsid of the FMD virus (FMDV) Asia1/MOG/05. In addition, infectious 6xHIS-tagged stable (S/T) FMDVs were maintained under acidic conditions (pH 6.0) and were readily purified from small-scale cultures using a commercial metal-affinity column. The groups vaccinated with the S/T FMDV antigen showed complete protection comparing to low survival rate in the group vaccinated with non-S/T FMDV against lethal challenge with Asia1 Shamir in mice. Therefore, the present findings indicate that the stabilized and tagged antigen offers an alternative to using the current methods for antigen purification and enhancement of stability and has potential for the development of a new FMD vaccine.