DESIGN OF VIRAL VECTORS FOR EXPRESSING INFLUENZA PROTEINS

Pierce, Randy A

Student Work

DESIGN OF VIRAL VECTORS FOR EXPRESSING INFLUENZA PROTEINS

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Influenza is a major cause of human illness and death, and as such requires vast attention.Current vaccine research shows that human sera have influenza virus-specific antibodies which mediate the complement-dependent lysis(CDL) of viral infected cells and these antibodies may be more cross-reactive than typical neutralizing antibodies.This project focused on the development of a protein expression system that would allow human A549 cells to express influenza proteins to be used in analyzing the specificity of CDL antibodies.The results show that a lentiviral expression system is not the best method of expression; only H3 protein expression was confirmed by immunoblotting. Several influenza gene constructs were then successfully constructed for future vaccinia virus expression experiments.

This report represents the work of one or more WPI undergraduate students submitted to the faculty as evidence of completion of a degree requirement. WPI routinely publishes these reports on its website without editorial or peer review.

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