The Section of viral Infections focuses on three emerging and reemerging viral diseases that are prevalent in Asian countries including Thailand in collaboration with the National Institute of Health, Department of Medical Sciences, Ministry of Public Health of Thailand. The first one is mosquito-borne infectious diseases, and we study chikungunya fever from epidemiological, molecular biological and immunological aspects. The second one is blood-borne infectious diseases (HIV diseases/AIDS), and we perform virological and immunological characterization of the HIV-1 CRF01_AE strains prevalent in Southeast Asian countries including Thailand. In addition, the studies to elucidate the mechanism of the anti-retroviral drug resistance are in progress. The last one is enteric viral diseases including norovirus and hepatitis A virus infections, in which we perform molecular epidemiological studies using specimens from patients with diarrhea as well as environmental water. We also perform genetic analysis of the viruses and develop control measures of the diseases.
Figure 1. Genome organization of chikungunya virus (CHIKV) and research projects on chikungunya fever. CHIKV (BSL3) is a positive-sense single stranded RNA virus with 60-70 nm in diameter. When the subgenomic region encoding entire structural proteins was expressed, they self-assembled into virus-like particles, which were morphologically and antigenically similar to those of native CHIKV. Expression vectors encoding envelop proteins, E3, E2, 6k and E1, lentivirus packaging vector, and lentivirus vector encoding luciferase were used to transfect 293T cells. The resultant lentivirus pseudotyped with CHIKV envelop proteins (BSL2) was applicable to the CHIKV neutralization test (Ref.3).