Hello
1- Q: I work on the swine influenza virus, I want to know if the results of the genetic characterization of the virus are sufficient to get an idea on the mode of evolution, or is antigenic characterization is necessary for the HA protein
2-Q: HI test, I understand the concept, but I want to know if the main objective is to know the presence of the cross reactivity
thank you
Hi Zeineb,
1Q-I think genetic characterization can´t be alone without antigenic assays. They are different things and can give you high level complementary information if you do both techniques at the same time. In the topic you are talking about, Genetic characterization can gives you a virtual frame of what is happening with the genes in your virus, but if you want to test the characteristics and behaviour of your viruses, you have to test by antigenic too. Think about you have a virus in wich you can see a mutation. If you can´t culture it, you will never know if this virus have potential ability to infect humans, or in your case swine.
2Q-Probably the first objective of HI assays is the surveillance of vaccine effect. We usually do in our National Influenza Centre serological test using HI assays to test vaccine effect in general population with pre and post vaccinated sera of each individual. This can give us an image of the global protection status of this population, and the protection offered by the vaccine each year. With this concept, we can check the vaccine failure if the vaccine composition have a missmatch with the influenza circulating strains (in this topic is very important the antigenic characterization). Of course also can be used to test cross immunity process.
Genetic characeterization can give you information of the evolution of the gene which can be translated to determine synonymous mutations which could affect antigenicity. In general, two or more mutations in two or more antigenic site could lead to antigenic drift. However, ideally, if you want to characterize the antigenicity of a certain strain relevant to other reference strains or vaccine strains, you will need to do HI test.
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