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Review
9.
Antigenic variation of foot and mouth disease
virus - An overview - Neeta longjam, Tilling Tayo
Vet World. 2011; 4(10): 475-479
doi: 10.5455/vetworld.2011.475-479
Abstract
Foot and mouth disease (FMD) is a highly
contagious viral diseases of cloven-hoofed
animals, caused by FMD virus, a single molecule of
linear positive sense, with single stranded RNA of
size 7.2– 8.4 kb. Antigenic variation is one of
the striking characters of FMD virus. It is a
process by which an infectious organism alters its
surface proteins in order to evade a host immune
response and is associated with mutation leading
to amino acid replacement. These changes may
result either in the field or in the laboratory
leading to the development of a new strain of
virus which totally differs from the circulating
field strain challenging the vaccine strains use
for controlling the diseases. The high sequence
variability found in VP1 region of this virus
accounts for the low cross-reactivity observed
among different serotypes of FMDV and also due to
high degree of antigenic variation may be
attributed to different reasons like high rate of
mutation, genetic recombination, quasispecies
nature of the virus and continuous circulation of
the virus in the field, which is a main loophole
for severe economic loss in livestock productions.
Keywords: antigenic variation, quasispecies,
FMD.
