Experimental infection of sheep with Bovine leukemia virus (BLV): Minimum dose of BLV-FLK cells and cell-free BLV and neutralization activity of natural antibodies.

In this report, we aimed to determine the minimum amount of FLK-BLV cells or cell-free supernatant containing BLV needed to produce infection in sheep. We also evaluated the amount of antibodies obtained from a naturally-infected cow required to neutralize this infection. We observed that both sheep experimentally inoculated with 5000 FLK-BLV cells became infected, as well as one of the sheep receiving 500 FLK-BLV cells. None of the animals inoculated with 50 FLK-BLV cells showed evidence of infection. The cell-free FLK-BLV supernatant proved to be infective in sheep up to a 1:1000 dilution. Specific BLV antibodies showed neutralizing activity as none of the sheep became infected. Conversely, the animals receiving a BLV-negative serum showed signs of BLV infection. These results contribute to the optimization of a sheep bioassay which could be useful to further characterize BLV infection. PMID: 31023494 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher]
Source: Revista Argentina de Microbiologia - Category: Microbiology Tags: Rev Argent Microbiol Source Type: research