Research progress on the proteins involved in African swine fever virus infection and replication

Abstract

African swine fever (ASF) is an acute, hemorrhagic and highly contagious infectious disease caused by African swine fever virus (ASFV), which infects domestic pigs or wild boars. It is characterized by short course of disease, high fever and hemorrhagic lesions, with mortality of up to 100% from acute infection. Up to now, the lack of commercial vaccines and effective drugs has seriously threatened the healthy economic development of the global pig industry. ASFV is a double-stranded DNA virus and genome varies between about 170-194 kb, which encodes 150-200 viral proteins, including 68 structural proteins and more than 100 non-structural proteins. In recent years, although the research on structure and function of ASFV-encoded proteins has been deepened, the structure and infection process of ASFV are still not clear. This review summarizes the main process of ASFV infection, replication and functions of related viral proteins to provide scientific basis and theoretical basis for ASFV research and vaccine development.

Keywords: African swine fever virus; infection; replication; transcription; virus factory.

Figure 1

Replication cycle of ASFV. ASFV enters host cells mainly through macropinocytosis and endocytosis, during which the capsid is removed. Endosomes migrate, mature and acidify in the cell, gradually forming multiple vesicles (MVB), late endosomes (LE) and endosomal lysosomes. The fusion of the viral inner membrane with the late endosomal membrane releases the viral core into the cytoplasm. The virus core is routed to the virus factory through microtubule system. Mature virions arrive at the cell surface by microtubule-mediated transporting and finally release from the cell by budding on the plasma membrane.