Abstract

Despite all efforts, there is still no effective vaccine available against the human respiratory syncytial virus (HRSV) that is a major cause of severe lower respiratory tract disease in infants and the elderly. In this review, we examined the potential of the conserved immunogenic region (residues 122-226) of the HRSV glycoprotein G alone as the inducer of neutralizing antibodies against this virus. The Escherichia coli produced recombinant conserved region of G (designated as G domain), which was used for rabbit immunization. Although rabbit is semipermissive host for HRSV, our result showed that the polyclonal antibodies against the G domain protein could strongly neutralize the virus (69.3), suggesting that the G immunogenic region of HRSV alone has a great potential in vaccine development. To our knowledge, this is the first report in which neutralizing antibodies to respiratory syncytial virus have been evoked using bacterially expressed G immunogenic domain protein without any adjuvant. (C) 2011 International Union of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Inc. Volume 58, Number 2, March/April 2011, Pages 97-102. E-mail: kyusoff@biotech.upm.edu.my