Hepatitis E Virus (HEV) is a zoonotic pathogen responsible for causing acute hepatitis in human, especially in developing countries. Diagnosis of HEV usually relies on the detection of antibodies mostly by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA). In the present study, we designed a new indirect ELISA (iELISA) based on a short recombinant peptide derived from the capsid protein (ORF2p) and dem...

Hepatitis E virus (HEV), an enterically transmitted pathogen, is one of the major causes of acute hepatitis in humans worldwide, being responsible for outbreaks and epidemics in regions with suboptimal sanitary conditions, in many of which it is endemic. In industrialized countries, hepatitis E is rarely reported, but recent studies have revealed quite high human seroprevalence rates and the po...

Zoonotic infections with hepatitis E virus (HEV) genotype 3 are presumably transmitted via contaminated pig meat products, which raises the necessity for enhanced serological surveillance of pig herds. The aim of the study was to set up a novel protein expression system to overcome the well-known problems in (HEV-) protein expression using the standard Escherichia coli tools such as inclusion b...

BACKGROUND Viral protein expression in Escherichia coli (E. coli) is a powerful tool for structural/functional studies as well as for vaccine and diagnostics development. However, numerous factors such as codon bias, mRNA secondary structure and nucleotides distribution, have been indentified to hamper this heterologous expression. RESULTS In this study, we combined computational and biochemi...

Julie A. Kase (corresponding author) Microbial Methods Development Branch Division of Microbiology, Office of Regulatory Sciences Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition, US Food and Drug Administration 5100, Paint Branch Parkway, Rm 3E-017, HFS-711, College Park, MD 20740, USA Tel.: 301.436.2571 Fax: 301.436.2644 E-mail: [email protected] Mark D. Sobsey Department of Environmental Sc...

1 Department of Biotechnology. INIA. Madrid, Spain. 2 Department of Infectious Pathology 9 and Epidemiology. F. Veterinaria. U. Zaragoza (Spain). 3 National Institute for Public 10 Health and the Environment. RIVM, Bilthoven (The Netherlands). 11 12 *Corresponding author: J. C. Saiz 13 Departamento de Biotecnología 14 Instituto Nacional de Investigación y Tecnología Agraria y 15 Alimentaria (IN...

Figure 1. Phylogenetic tree constructed by the neighbor-joining method and based on the partial nucleotide sequence (301 nt) of the open reading frame 2 region of 50 human and swine hepatitis E virus (HEV) isolates. The nucleotide sequences of 49 known human and swine HEV isolates were retrieved from GenBank/DDBJ/EMBL databases on 22 July 2002. The partial nucleotide sequence of HE-JO-1982 obta...

Hepatitis E virus (HEV) is a causative agent of hepatitis E. Recently, a novel hepatitis E-like virus was isolated from Norway rats in Germany. However, the antigenicity, pathogenicity and epidemiology of this virus are unclear because of the lack of a cell-culture system in which to grow it. In this study, an N-terminally truncated ORF2 protein was expressed in insect Tn5 cells using a recombi...

Hepatitis E virus (HEV) is a causative agent for hepatitis. HEV is transmitted via the fecal-oral route through contaminated drinking water and induces zoonotic infections through eating uncooked and undercooked meat of deer, wild boar, and swine. In Japan, genotypes 3 (G3) and 4 (G4) are prevalent in domestic swine. Here, we examined the genetic variation among HEVs derived from swine fecal sa...