The porcine family of interferon-omega: cloning, structural analysis, and functional studies of five related genes.

We report the molecular characterization of the porcine IFN-omega multigenic family which appears to comprise six to seven loci. Five of these loci were cloned and sequenced, revealing two pseudogenes (psi PoIFN-omega 1 and -omega 2) and three genes with an intact reading frame (PoIFN-omega 3, -omega 4, and -omega 5) that could encode preproteins of 179-190 amino acids including a putative signal peptide of 23 residues. By comparison of porcine IFN-omega coding sequences to those of known mammalian counterparts, it appeared that porcine sequences contain an in-frame five-codon deletion (between positions 113 and 117) in a region of relatively high sequence variability.

Natural killer (NK) activity and interferon (IFN) production by a fraction of spleen and blood lymphocytes in swine.

After carbonyl iron treatment and gradient isolation, spleen and blood pig lymphocytes exhibited NK activity and produced IFN after viral induction. Removal of plastic-adherent cells, including the majority of B cells, did not change these activities. The plastic-non-adherent cells were further separated into two subsets of roughly similar size by panning using a monoclonal, anti-T, and anti-null cell antibodies (81 + cells).