Author(s)

Manabu Murakami¹, Takafumi Tasaki¹, Souichi Nukuzuma², Hiroshi Minato³, Takayuki Nojima³, Yasuhito Ishigaki¹, Tsutomu Takegami^1*

¹Department of Life Science, Medical Research Institute, Kanazawa Medical University, Uchinada, Japan.
²Kobe Institute of Health, Kobe City, Japan.
³Department of Clinical Pathology, Kanazawa Medical University Uchinada, Japan.

Japanese Encephalitis Virus (JEV) is responsible for over 30,000 annual cases of encephalitis worldwide, causing 30% mortality. JEV is thus a continuing threat to public health, so development of new antiviral drugs against JEV is desirable. Here, we examined JEV replication in mouse and used a short hairpin RNA JRi as the antiviral agent. The features of virus replication in neuron and survival rates of mice infected with JEV were different between virus strains. The mice infected with the virulent JEV strain (JaGAr01) were injected with pJRi (100 μg/mouse) which produced shRNAJRi. The survival rates of mice treated at 3 days before, the same day and 3 days after JEV infection were 22%, 78% and 44%, respectively. In addition, we demonstrated that the injection of pJRi induced interferon (IFN) production in cells and mice. These results suggest that the replication of JEV can be efficiently inhibited by RNAi and innate immunity including IFN. These data mean that pJRi has the inhibitory activity against JEV infection in vivo, and could be used as an antiviral drug to treat JEV infection.

Japanese Encephalitis Virus, Mice, shRNA, Antiviral

Murakami, M. , Tasaki, T. , Nukuzuma, S. , Minato, H. , Nojima, T. , Ishigaki, Y. and Takegami, T. (2016) Japanese Encephalitis Virus Replication and Inhibitory Effect of shRNA in Mice. Advances in Microbiology, 6, 462-470. doi: 10.4236/aim.2016.66045.