Research Projects

African swine fever (ASF) is a contagious viral disease of pigs, which can cause mortality approaching 100%. ASF is a serious threat to the global pig industry and its frequent outbreaks in the globe is imparting serious economic impact on pig rearing farmers. Recently, the outbreaks of ASF in Assam and Arunachal Pradesh have nudged the piggery sector of northeast India. One of the best possible ways to control outbreak of infectious diseases is early and rapid diagnosis as well as vaccination of healthy population. As of now, there is no indigenous diagnostic assay or vaccine for ASF available in India, as ASF occurred for the first time in our country. Keeping in view these facts, this project is proposed to develop indigenous protein and nucleic acid based diagnostic assays for real-time detection of ASFV at laboratory and field condition as well as to identify and characterize certain ASFV antigens having potential to be used as vaccine candidate.

Cloning, expression, purification, and characterization of immunogenic proteins p30 andp54 of African Swine Fever Virus (ASFV) in abacterial expression system has been done. Construction, recovery, and characterization of recombinant NDV strain B1/lentogenic NDV cDNAs and recombinant adenovirus expressing immunogenic structural proteins of ASFV have been developed. The potential NDV vectored vaccine candidates exhibited promising humoral and cell-mediate immune response in pigs. Molecular characterization of ASFV circulating in 8 states of NER has been done and it was observed that in the states of NER the genotype-II is in circulation. The vaccine candidates both protein cocktail and NDV vectored exhibited promising and broad-spectrum immune response. The indirect ELISA optimized to detect ASFV antibodies showed high % of sensitivity and specificity with no cross-reactivity. The whole genome sequence of ASFV strains circulating in NER of India were revealed. The bioinformatics analysis supported that the genotype-II of ASFV is currently prevalent in NER and its genomic identity is ~99% similar to other genotype-II of ASFV strains reported from different geographical locations. The primers were designed and the protocol for PSR has been optimized. The optimum temperature was observed to be 650 C and the optimum time found to be suitable is 40 min for PSR assay. It was found to be more sensitive than conventional PCR and observed to ve very specific for ASFV. Real time qPCR based assays were developed for the detection of ASFV virus in various tissues of pigs.