Construction of Ebola virus glycoprotein-pseudotyped lentivirus

Ebola virus, the pathogen of Ebola haemorrhagic fever, causes human and primates severe disease and high case-fatality rates(up to 90%). As a highly contagious pathogen, the operation of live viruses has to be conducted in biosafetylevel 4 facilities. In order to develop a surrogate for live virus, Ebola virus glycoprotein(Ebola-GP) expressing recombinant plasmid was co-transfected with human immunodeficiency syndrome virus(HIV-1) based retroviral vector into human embryonic kidney(HEK) 293 T cells for the construction of the Ebola-GP pseudotyped lentivirus. Results showed that the Ebola GP successfully packaged with HIV-1 viral genome. In addition, the expression of reporter gene(GPF) could be detected in Ghost,Vero, 293 T and Hela cells when the pseudotyped viruses were used to infect these cells lines, suggesting that the GP-pseudotyped lentiviruses were able to mimic the live viruses to infect target cells. This study provided an practically platform for further research on the mechanism of virus infection and Ebola virus neutralizing antibody screening.