Borna disease virus (BDV), the causative agent of severe meningoencephalitis in a wide variety of animal species, has been considered to be genetically invariable and to form a single type within the genus Bornavirus of the family Bornaviridae. BDV infections are of particular interest, because for the first time a virus infection appears to be linked to human psychiatric disorders. We now desc...

Open reading frame IV (ORF-IV) of Borna disease virus (BDV) encodes a protein with a calculated molecular mass of ca. 57 kDa (p57), which increases after N glycosylation to 94 kDa (gp94). The unglycosylated and glycosylated proteins are proteolytically cleaved by the subtilisin-like protease furin. Furin most likely recognizes one of three potential cleavage sites, namely, an arginine at positi...

Bovine viral diarrhoea virus (BVDV) isolates infect cultured Madin-Darby bovine kidney (MDBK) cells as efficiently as sheep kidney cells. In contrast, border disease virus (BDV) propagates poorly in MDBK cells but infects sheep cells very efficiently. The envelope glycoprotein E2 has been shown to be essential for virus infectivity. To explore the potential role of E2 in pestivirus host range i...

Borna disease virus (BDV), the etiological agent of Borna disease (BD), causes a central nervous system disease that is manifested by profound behavioral abnormalities, accumulation of disease-specific antigens in limbic system neurons, and often, but not always, the presence of inflammatory cell infiltrates in the brain (35, 36, 47). BDV has been characterized recently as a nonsegmented, negat...

The purpose of this study was to investigate whether sheep grazing communal alpine pastures with cattle can transmit Border disease virus (BDV) to cattle. A total of 1170 sheep and 923 cattle were tested for BDV using RT-PCR (sheep) and for pestivirus antibodies using an ELISA (cattle), respectively, before being moved to one of 4 pastures (A, B, C and D). Eight sheep from pasture C were viraem...

Borna disease virus (BDV) is a negative-strand RNA virus that infects the central nervous systems (CNS) of warm-blooded animals and causes disturbances of movement and behavior. The basis for neurotropism remains poorly understood; however, the observation that the distribution of infectious virus in immunocompetent rats is different from that in immunoincompetent rats indicates a role for the ...

RNA, extracted from peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMC) obtained from 81 Korean psychiatric patients (39 with schizophrenia, 33 with bipolar affective disorders and nine with major depression), was analyzed for a 391-nucleotide, highly conserved region of the p24 protein-encoding ORF II of Borna disease virus (BDV), using nested reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR). BD...

Based on partial amino acid sequences obtained from tryptic peptides of the purified 24K antigen of Borna disease virus (BDV), we identified and sequenced four independent cDNA clones established from BDV-infected MDCK cells. Each of the clones encodes a polypeptide of 201 residues (Mr 22461) that differs considerably from an amino acid sequence published recently. In vitro transcription/transl...

The guanosine analogue ribavirin was tested for antiviral activity in two neural cell lines, human oligodendrocytes and rat glia, against Borna disease virus (BDV) strains V and He/80. Ribavirin treatment resulted in lower levels of virus and viral transcripts within 12 h. Addition of guanosine but not adenosine resulted in a profound reduction of the ribavirin effect. Ribavirin appears to be a...