David H. L. Bishop

Mutagen-directed Attenuation of Rift Valley Fever Virus as a Method for Vaccine Development

Serial mutagenesis with 5-fluorouracil has been employed to derive an attenuated strain of Rift Valley fever virus for use as a live virus vaccine.

Studies on the generation of vesicular stomatitis virus (Indiana serotype) defective interfering particles

Abstract Using freshly cloned vesicular stomatis virus (Indiana serotype) (VSV IND ) serial undiluted high-multiplicity passage in four different cell lines has produced different size classes of defective interfering (DI) particles at different passage numbers. The same clonal isolates of VSV in a given cell type appear to produce identical patterns of particles, although different clonal isolates produce different size classes of DI particles. Thus, the classes of DI particles generated during serial passages appear to relate in some way to the clone of virus and to the type of host cell used. All the DI particles generated in different cell types are capable of homologous interference in any cell type. Oligonucleotide sequence analyses of five DI particle RNAs indicate that they are all generated from a specific region of the standard B virion genome and contain only negative-stranded genomic RNA.

The Application of RNA Fingerprinting and Sequencing to Viral Diagnosis

More than 600 different virus serotypes have been shown to infect animals. Fortunately only a minority are the etiologic agents of disease in man. Despite this, they are of major concern since currently only a few viral diseases can be cured and only a few can be prevented by vaccination.