Related Experiment Video
Updated: Apr 14, 2026
Dissecting Innate Immune Signaling in Viral Evasion of Cytokine Production
Published on: March 2, 2014
Cloning, expression and antiviral activity of mink alpha-interferons
Hai-ling Zhang1, Jian-jun Zhao2, Xiu-li Chai3
1Division of Infectious Diseases of Special Economic Animal, Institute of Special Animal and Plant Sciences, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, 4899 Juye Street, Changchun, 130112, China. zhanghailing@caas.cn.
Background:
As a key link between innate and adaptive immune responses, the interferon (IFN) system is the first line of defense against viral infection. IFN, and in particular, IFN-α, has been used clinically as an effective therapeutic agent for viral infections. However, different subtypes of IFN-α demonstrate distinct antiviral activity. Therefore, it is important to identify IFN-α subtypes with high antiviral activity for the development of genetically engineered antiviral drugs.
Results:
In this study, we cloned the genes for 13 IFN-α subtypes from peripheral blood lymphocytes of the mink. The homologies of the 13 mink IFN-α genes were 93.6-99.3% and 88.8-98.4% at the nucleotide and amino acid sequence levels, respectively. In contrast to human and canine IFN-α subtypes, most mink IFN-α subtypes contained two N-glycosylation sites. We expressed and purified 13 mink IFN-α subtypes in Escherichia coli. The cytopathic effect inhibition assay showed that all the 13 recombinant mink IFN-α subtypes inhibited the propagation of vesicular stomatitis virus in WISH cells, with IFN-α2 and IFN-α12 demonstrating the highest activities. Furthermore, recombinant mink IFN-α2 and IFN-α12 significantly suppressed the propagation of canine distemper virus in Vero cells, with IFN-α2 demonstrating the highest activity.
Conclusions:
We identified the mink IFN-α2 subtype as a promising candidate for the development of effective antiviral drugs.
