Abstract
Understanding the immune responses against Porcine epidemic diarrhea virus (PEDV) is important to prevent infection and to design control strategies. We evaluated both systemic and mucosal immune responses to PEDV in pigs and assessed if prior exposure to virus protects against re-infection. Three-week-old pigs were infected with PEDV and immune response in blood, intestine, and mesenteric lymph node (MLN) was evaluated. At 30 dpi, virus exposed pigs were challenged with a field isolate of PEDV and immune response at 5 d post challenge was evaluated. We found that PEDV RNA persists in the intestine even after fecal shedding of the virus was stopped at 28 dpi and pigs previously exposed to PEDV are protected from virus shedding after re-infection. PEDV infection induced both humoral and cell mediated immune response with an increase in PEDV specific IgA and IgG antibodies in intestine and serum. Flow cytometry analysis showed a significantly higher frequency of B cells and lower frequency of T cells at 4 dpi. The frequency of CD4/CD8 double positive (DP) memory T cells was significantly increased in the MLN of challenged animals. These studies may provide further insights into understanding the mucosal immune response to PEDV and its role in protection against disease.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Article number | e0231723 |
| Journal | PloS one |
| Volume | 15 |
| Issue number | 4 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Apr 1 2020 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:This study was funded in part by the State of Minnesota (#84600/13621), the University of Minnesota College of Veterinary Medicine Emerging and Zoonotic Diseases Signature program (#MN-62-092), and the National Pork Board, Des Moines, Iowa, USA (#14-275). There was no additional external funding received for this study. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2020 Krishna et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.