TY - GEN T1 - Antibody Responses in Humans Infected with Newly Emerging Strains of West Nile Virus in Europe AU - Chabierski, Stefan AU - Makert, Gustavo R. AU - Kerzhner, Alexandra AU - Barzon, Luisa AU - Fiebig, Petra AU - Liebert, Uwe G. AU - Papa, Anna AU - Richner, Justin M. AU - Niedrig, Matthias AU - Diamond, Michael S. AU - Palu, Giorgio AU - Ulbert, Sebastian AB - Infection with West Nile Virus (WNV) affects an increasing number of countries worldwide. Although most human infections result in no or mild flu-like symptoms, the elderly and those with a weakened immune system are at higher risk for developing severe neurological disease. Since its introduction into North America in 1999, WNV has spread across the continental United States and caused annual outbreaks with a total of 36,000 documented clinical cases and ~1,500 deaths. In recent years, outbreaks of neuroinvasive disease also have been reported in Europe. The WNV strains isolated during these outbreaks differ from those in North America, as sequencing has revealed that distinct phylogenetic lineages of WNV concurrently circulate in Europe, which has potential implications for the development of vaccines, therapeutics, and diagnostic tests. Here, we studied the human antibody response to European WNV strains responsible for outbreaks in Italy and Greece in 2010, caused by lineage 1 and 2 strains, respectively. The WNV structural proteins were expressed as a series of overlapping fragments fused to a carrier-protein, and binding of IgG in sera from infected persons was analyzed. The results demonstrate that, although the humoral immune response to WNV in humans is heterogeneous, several dominant peptides are recognized. KW - Humans KW - Amino Acid Sequence KW - Molecular Sequence Data KW - Species Specificity KW - Enzyme-Linked Immunosorbent Assay KW - Antibody Formation/immunology KW - Communicable Diseases Emerging/immunology KW - Disease Outbreaks/history KW - Epitopes B-Lymphocyte/genetics KW - Greece/epidemiology KW - History 21st Century KW - Immunoglobulin G/immunology KW - Italy/epidemiology KW - Protein Binding KW - West Nile Fever/epidemiology KW - West Nile Fever/immunology KW - West Nile virus/genetics KW - West Nile virus/immunology KW - 610 Medizin PY - 2013 LA - eng PB - Robert Koch-Institut VL - 8 IS - 6 DO - 10.1371/journal.pone.0066507 ER -