Obtención de antígenos recombinantes del virus del Nilo Occidental en larvas de insecto aplicación diagnóstica y capacidad inmunogénica y protectora en el modelo murino

• Autores: Julio Alonso Padilla
• Directores de la Tesis: Juan Carlos Saiz (dir. tes.)
• Lectura: En la Universidad Autónoma de Madrid ( España ) en 2010
• Idioma: español
• Tribunal Calificador de la Tesis: Juan Ortín Montón (presid.), Margarita Sáiz Zalabardo (secret.), María Paz Sánchez-Seco Fariñas (voc.), Alejandro Brun Torres (voc.), Ursula Höfle (voc.), Fernando de Ory Manchón (voc.), Fernando Rodríguez (voc.)
• Materias:
  • Ciencias de la vida
    • Biología molecular
• Enlaces
  • Tesis en acceso abierto en: Biblos-e Archivo
• Resumen

  • West Nile virus (WNV) is a positive strand RNA enveloped virus (Flavivirus genus, Flaviviridae family), which is maintained in nature in an enzootic cycle that involves mosquito vectors and birds as primary hosts, but it can also infect other vertebrates, such as humans and horses. Although WNV infection is asymptomatic in the majority of cases, neural tropism of the virus can lead to death or leave severe sequelae especially in immunesuppressed patients.

    First isolated in Uganda in 1937, WNV is endemic in regions of Africa, Europe, Asia, Oceania and America and it is therefore the most worldwide distributed flavivirus. Originally associated with a flu-like disease (West Nile fever) with sporadic encephalitic cases reported in the Mediterranean basin, its epidemiology changed in the 1990's, when WNV neurovirulent strains emerged in Tunisia, Romania, Russia and Israel. In 1999, the virus was responsible of an encephalitic outbreak in New York, U.S.A. In a short time, WNV expanded its distribution throughout the American continent, mainly spread by infected migratory birds.

    The virus continuous expansion emphasizes the need of more efficient and safe diagnostic tools to perform accurate epidemiologic surveillance.

    WNV diagnosis is mostly performed serologically as the viremia is short lasting and usually precedes the onset of disease symptoms. Although the reference technique is the plaque reduction neutralization test (PRNT), this is laborious, time-consuming, and implies working with live virus in biosafety level 3 (BSL-3) facilities; therefore several enzymelinked immunosorbent assays (ELISA) have been developed lately. These allow fast highthroughput results, which can be very helpful to filter off negative samples previous to PRNT confirmation.