In vivo rescue of arboviruses directly from subgenomic DNA fragments

Abstract

Reverse genetic systems are mainly used to rescue recombinant viral strains in cell culture. To a lesser extent, these tools have also been used to generate, by inoculating infectious clones, viral strains directly in living animals. We previously developed the 'Infectious Subgenomic Amplicons' (ISA) method, which enables rescue of single-stranded positive-sense RNA viruses in vitro by transfecting overlapping subgenomic DNA fragments. Here, we provide proof-of-concept for direct in vivo generation of infectious particles following the inoculation of subgenomic amplicons. First, we rescued a strain of tick-borne encephalitis virus in mice to transpose the ISA method in vivo. Subgenomic DNA fragments were amplified using a 3-fragment reverse genetics system and inoculated intramuscularly to animals. Almost all animals were infected when quantities of DNA inoculated were at least 20µg. We then optimized our procedure in order to increase the animal infection rate. This was achieved by adding an electroporation step and/or using a simplified 2-fragment reverse genetics system. Under optimal conditions, a large majority of animals were infected with doses of 20ng of DNA. Finally, we demonstrated the versatility of this method by applying it to Japanese encephalitis and Chikungunya viruses. This method provides an efficient strategy for in vivo rescue of arboviruses. Furthermore, in the context of the development of DNA-launched live attenuated vaccines, this new approach may facilitate the generation of attenuated strains in vivo. It also enables to deliver a substance free of any vector DNA, which seems to be an important criterion for the development of human vaccines.