Rescue of Recombinant Newcastle Disease Virus Expressing Heterologous Genes

Reverse genetics allows for the generation of recombinant infectious viruses from viral sequences or complete viral genomes cloned into plasmids. Using reverse genetics, it is then possible to introduce changes in the genome of infectious viruses for multiple applications.Newcastle disease virus (NDV) is a non-segmented, negative-sense RNA virus that has been amenable to manipulation by reverse genetics for more than two decades. Since then, recombinant NDVs have been extensively used as viral vectors to express heterologous proteins. We describe the key steps required to design and introduce an additional transcription unit in the genome of the Newcastle disease virus for the efficient expression of a heterologous gene.