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For control of brucellosis in small ruminants, attenuated B. melitensis Rev1 is used but it can be virulent for animals and human. Based on these aspects, it is essential to identify potential immunogens to avoid these problems in prevention of brucellosis. The majority of OMPs in the Omp25/31 family have been studied because these proteins are relevant in maintaining the integrity of the outer membrane but their implication in the virulence of the different species of this genus is not clearly described. Therefore, in this work we studied the role of Omp31 on virulence by determining the residual virulence and detecting lesions in spleen and testis of mice inoculated with the B. melitensis LVM31 mutant strain. In addition, we evaluated the conferred protection in mice immunized with the mutant strain against the challenge with the B. melitensis Bm133 virulent strain. Our results showed that the mutation of omp 31 caused a decrease in splenic colonization without generating apparent lesions or histopathological changes apparent in both organs in comparison with the control strains and that the mutant strain conferred similar protection as the B. melitensis Rev1 vaccine strain against the challenge with B. melitensis Bm133 virulent strain. These results allow us to conclude that Omp31 plays an important role on the virulence of B. melitensis in the murine model, and due to the attenuation shown by the strain, it could be considered a vaccine candidate for the prevention of goat brucellosis.

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The dynamics of the nonlinear Helmholtz Oscillator with fractional order damping are studied in detail. The discretization of differential equations according to the Grünwald-Letnikov fractional derivative definition in order to get numerical simulations is reported. Comparison between solutions obtained through a fourth-order Runge-Kutta method and the fractional damping system are comparable when the fractional derivative of the damping term a is fixed at 1. That proves the good performance of the numerical scheme. The effect of taking the fractional derivative on the system dynamics is investigated using phase diagrams varying a from 0.5 to 1.75 with zero initial conditions. Periodic motions of the system are obtained at certain ranges of the damping term. On the other hand, escape of the trajectories from a potential well result at a certain critical value of the fractional derivative. The history of the displacement as a function of time is shown also for every a selected.