Screening Of B Cell Mimotopes Of SARS Coronavirus N Protein From Phage Display Peptide Library

Background and Objective: SARS has been a great threaten to human health and economic development. However, no specific therapeutic measure for SARS is developed yet. Eighty percent of SARS patients in the earliest two phases, i.e., virus replication stage and hypersensitivity reaction stage, take a turn for the better and get cured eventually after a timely, effective cure with medical appliances and drug treatments. Since SARS is an infectious disease happened recently, and its damage is by far beyond the damage brought by the disease itself, it is urgent to take a thorough research into this disease about its mechanism, diagnosis, prevention and cure.Nucleocapsid protein(N protein), composed of 422 amino acids and with a molecular weight about 46 kDa, is one of the important structural proteins of SARS-CoV, and is located in the core of SARS-CoV. It has been showed N protein can be seen in a variety of organs and tissues of SARS patients, its genome array is essentially conserved, its antigenicity is high and may produce strong and permanent immune response, and its antibody is detectable in the earlier periods of the disease. These features make N protein to be a suitable candidate gene for SARS vaccine and a good antigen for early diagnostic application.Our laboratory has obtained 88 monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) of N protein ,...