Fowl adenovirus-based vaccine platform

Abstract

Nonpathogenic fowl adenoviruses (FAdVs) are amenable for engineering multivalent vaccine platforms due to large stretches of nonessential DNA sequences in their genomes. We describe the generation of FAdV-9-based vaccine platforms by targeted homologous recombination in an infectious clone (pPacFAdV-9 or wild type FAdmid) containing the entire viral genome in a cosmid vector. The viral DNA is subsequently released from the cosmid by restriction enzyme digestion followed by transfection in a chicken hepatoma cell line (CH-SAH). Virus is harvested, propagated, and verified for foreign gene expression.