The state-run Animal and Plant Quarantine Agency has begun a video abstract service to promote its research output, with top articles already promoted via the new service.

According to the agency, an affiliate of the Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs, the APQA library has also made a section for the video abstract on its website.

It expects that the research output of APQA will spread to research institutes in other countries, opening doors for more research collaboration opportunities.

The first article to get a video abstract was “A novel chimeric vaccine candidate for porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome virus (PRRSV) I and II elicits neutralizing antibodies against both types. Journal of General Virology. 2023; 104(8)” by Cha Sang-Ho and eight other researchers.

The Journal of General Virology (Microbiology Society) has been publishing peer-reviewed research for more than 50 years. The journal is indexed to SCIE and its JCR Impact Factor was 3.6 in 2023.

Porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome is a devastating disease to the pig farming industry. Infected pigs suffer from stillbirth and miscarriages, and wasting disease in growing pigs.

It is estimated to cause losses of more than $200 million and $664 million to the farming industries of South Korea and the United States, respectively.

The virus is divided into two genotypes -- PRRSV type 1 (European type) and PRRSV type 2 (North American type) -- with a low antigenic relatedness between them. Thus, the vaccines against PRRSVs -- made with live attenuated viruses -- have been produced with PRRSV reference viruses of both type 1 and type 2.

Generally, live attenuated vaccine is made with a virus, which loses its virulence after long-term cell culture.

However, the vaccine has a risk of recovering its virulence back while farms vaccinate with the live vaccine. That is why the live vaccine is not widely used.

This study successfully constructed a vaccine candidate virus by using genetic recombination to combine viral genomic regions of PRRSV type 1 and type 2.

This recombinant virus, developed in the study, had genomic and antigenic features of type 1 as well as type 2, and pigs vaccinated with the virus produced neutralizing antibodies against both types.

This vaccine is differentiated from the current commercialized vaccine in several ways.

First, the novel vaccine can protect pigs from disease caused by two different types, while the current vaccine is effective only against type 1 or type 2, depending on the type of vaccine strains used. Secondly, the technology demonstrated in the study shows that new vaccine candidates can be synthesized at super-fast rates to deal with the emergence of new mutations.

The virulence of PRRSV can also coordinated to be hardly converted into originally virulent strains.

The vaccine candidate should be highly efficient, particularly in areas where PRRSV type 1 or type 2 viruses are endemic, for the prevention of pigs from being infected.

APQA is planning to introduce more of its top research articles via video abstracts in the coming months.