African swine fever (ASF) is a contagious disease of pigs caused by the ASF virus (ASFV). The main problem in the field of ASF control is the lack of vaccines. Attempts to obtain vaccines by attenuating the ASFV on cultured cell lines led to the production of attenuated viruses, some of which provided protection against infection with a homologous virus.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFEver since 1994, when the bacterial pathogen jumped from poultry to wild birds, it has been assumed that the primary host species of this pathogen in wild North American birds was the house finch (), in which disease prevalence was higher than in any other bird species. Here we tested two hypotheses to explain a recent increase in disease prevalence in purple finches () around Ithaca, New York. Hypothesis 1 is that, as evolved and became more virulent, it has also become better adapted to other finches.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe necessity for multiple injections and cold-chain storage has contributed to suboptimal vaccine utilization, especially in pandemic situations. Thermally-stable and single-administration vaccines hold a great potential to revolutionize the global immunization process. Here, a new approach to thermally stabilize protein-based antigens is presented and a new high-throughput antigen-loading process is devised to create a single-administration, pulsatile-release microneedle (MN) patch which can deliver a recombinant SARS-CoV-2 S1-RBD protein-a model for the COVID-19 vaccine.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis article describes the results of sequencing and analysis of the entire genome of the SARS-CoV-2 virus sampled in Kazakhstan in 2021. The whole-genome sequence of the strain was 29,751 bp. According to the results of phylogenetic analysis (according to the Pangolin COVID-19 database), the SARS-CoV-2/human/KAZ/B1.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF