A poster presentation entitled “Immune Response Phenotypes for Equine Viral Arteritis (EVA) Associated with Alleles of CXCL16” will be presented on Monday, Jan. 12, 2015, at the Plant and Animal Genome XXIII meeting in San Diego, California.
The poster will be presented by Ernest Bailey, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY; Yun Young Go, Divisoni of Drug Discovery Research, Daejon, South Korea; John Edmund Eberth, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY; Kathy Shuck, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY; Frank Cook, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY; Bora Nam, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY; Theodore S. Kalbfleisch, University of Louisville, Louisville, KY; Peter Timoney, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY; Udeni B. R. Balasuriya, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY.
Following is information from the conference’s website about the poster.
“Equine viral arteritis is a systemic viral disease of horses and related equids. While the majority of infections with the etiologic agent, equine arteritis virus, are subclinical, the virus can cause flu-like clinical signs, abortion and pneumonia in young foals. Stallions may become persistently infected and shed the virus in their semen. Immunological studies demonstrated that CD3+T cells of some horses could become infected in vitro with the Bucyrus strain of the virus while the CD3+ T cells of other horses were resistant. Using GWAS, this property was shown to be genetic, implicating a region on horse chromosome 11 (ECA11). We report the discovery of three alleles of CXCL16 which appear to be responsible for controlling this effect. Whole genome sequencing was conducted on one resistant and two susceptible horses, leading to identification of 12 non-synonymous variants in 8 genes within the region implicated by GWAS. Of the 12 variants, 8 were not associated with the EVA-CD3+T phenotype. The 4 variants associated with the trait all occurred within one exon of CXCL16. Testing of 240 horses demonstrated the existence of three alleles for CXCL16, two associated with susceptibility and one with resistance. Subsequently, the susceptibility alleles were shown to be associated with the shedding phenotype in stallions (P<0.000001). This exon was sequenced for other members of the family Equidae (zebras, asses, Asiatic wild asses) and only the susceptible allele was found. This suggests that resistance is newly evolved in and unique to the horse clade.”
More information about the Plant and Animal Genome XXIII meeting, Jan. 10-14, 2015, in San Diego, California, can be found at http://intlpag.org/.
