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Generation of Escape Variants of Neutralizing Influenza Virus Monoclonal Antibodies
Published on: August 29, 2017
Downregulating viral gene expression: codon usage bias manipulation for the generation of novel influenza A virus
Steven F Baker1, Aitor Nogales1, Luis Martínez-Sobrido1
1Department of Microbiology & Immunology, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY, USA.
Abstract:
Vaccination represents the best option to protect humans against influenza virus. However, improving the effectiveness of current vaccines could better stifle the health burden caused by viral infection. Protein synthesis from individual genes can be downregulated by synthetically deoptimizing a gene's codon usage. With more rapid and affordable nucleotide synthesis, generating viruses that contain genes with deoptimized codons is now feasible. Attenuated, vaccine-candidate viruses can thus be engineered with hitherto uncharacterized properties. With eight gene segments, influenza A viruses with variably recoded genomes can produce a spectrum of attenuation that is contingent on the gene segment targeted and the number of codon changes. This review summarizes different targets and approaches to deoptimize influenza A virus codons for novel vaccine generation.
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