Somatostatin (SS) is a hormone that inhibits the secretion of growth hormone. Immunization against SS can promote the growth of animals. A novel SS-VP22 fused vaccine, pEGS2SS-V, was constructed from pEGS2SS plasmid with a VP22 gene fragment. Two times of immunization with pEGS2SS-V-induced anti-SS antibodies in mice. Compared with mice immunized with pEGS2SS and 0.85% saline, the growth performance of mice immunized with pEGS2SS-V was increased by 14.1% (P , 0.05) and 48.4% (P , 0.01) on the 2nd week after the first vaccination, respectively. The results indicated that the effects of the somatostatin DNA vaccine could be improved effectively by VP22 gene adjuvant.Keywords: BHV-1 VP22, somatostatin, DNA vaccine
IntroductionThe circadian and pulsatile secretion of growth hormone (GH) from the anterior pituitary gland plays a crucial role in postnatal longitudinal growth and development, tissue growth, lactation, reproduction, as well as protein, lipid and carbohydrate metabolism (Ohlsson et al., 1998;Ayuk and Sheppard, 2006). The secretion of GH is down-regulated by somatostatin (SS), which is secreted by the hypothalamus (Vance et al., 1992). The SS has broad inhibitory effect on animals, especially on animal growth and immune response; thus, exhausting or immuno-neutralizing the SS level could lead to increase in GH and promote animal growth (Ohlsson et al., 1998). Therefore, as an alternative approach to direct GH injection, immunization against SS that inhibits GH secretion has been suggested as a method to promote the growth of animals by inactivating SS in the plasma.SS is a 14-peptide-hormone with a small molecular weight and a very short half-life. Synthetic SS conjugated to a carrier protein promotes the growth rates of immunized animals, including lambs, steers and chickens (Buonomo et al., 1987;Van Kessel et al., 1990). However, native SS preparation is limited in source.Chemical synthesis is inefficient for polypeptides longer than about 300 amino acids, and the synthesized proteins may not readily assume their native tertiary structure. Besides, these programs are time-consuming and relatively expensive, which limit the application of SS immunization to promote animal growth.DNA immunization represents a novel vaccine strategy (Tang et al., 1992). So far, there have been several reports on DNA vaccines encoding the SS gene that can promote the growth of immunized animals in our lab (Liang et al., 2008). However, the potency of naked DNA vaccines is limited by their inability to amplify and spread in vivo; in primates and other large animals the responses are less impressive and the quantities of DNA required may be large (Calarota et al., 1998;Macgregor et al., 1998;Wang et al., 1998). It was reported that the tegument protein VP22 of bovine herpesvirus-1 (BHV-1) could increase the immunogenicity of antigens to which it was fused (Oliveira et al., 2001;Wills et al., 2001;Hung et al., 2002). VP22 of BHV-1 is a 258 amino acid tegument protein (Liang et al., 1995) that can transport proteins to neighbor...