Robust humoral immune response against rabies virus in rabbits and guinea pigs immunized with plasmid DNA vectors encoding rabies virus glycoproteins – An approach to the production of polyclonal antibody reagents

DNA-based immunization has been previously shown to be an efficient approach to induce robust immunity against infectious diseases in animals and humans. The advantages of DNA vaccines are simplicity of their construction and production, low cost, high stability, and ability to elicit a full spectrum of immune responses to target antigens. The goals of this study were (i) to assess the antibody immune response to rabies virus glycoproteins (rGPs) in rabbits and guinea pigs after intramuscular immunization with pTargeT and pVAC2-mcs mammalian expression vectors encoding either the wild-type (WT) or codon-optimized (cOPT) rGP genes; and (ii) to prepare in-house rabbit anti-rGP polyclonal antibody reagents suitable for in Single Radial Immunodiffusion (SRID) and Indirect Fluorescent Antibody (IFA) assays. The maximum antibody responses against rabies virus in rabbits and guinea pigs were observed after immunization series with 500 μg/dose of pVAC2-mcs vector encoding either the WT or cOPT rGP genes adjuvanted with Emulsigen-D. No significant difference in the anti-rabies virus neutralizing antibody titers was observed in rabbits immunized with the WT and cOPT rGPs. The in-house rabbit anti-rGP polyclonal antibody reagents reacted comparable to the current reference reagents in SRID and IFA assays. The results of the study demonstrated that the DNA immunization of animals with the WT or cOPT rGPs is a promising approach to either induction of high anti-rabies virus neutralizing antibody titers in vivo or for production of polyclonal antibody reagents against rabies. •DNA immunization of rabbits and guinea pigs with pVAC2-mcs, which encodes wild-type or codon-optimized genes of rabies glycoproteins, induced a strong humoral immune response.•Induced anti-rabies neutralizing antibodies have been shown to have a protective effect in the guinea pig model.•Hyperimmune antisera produced by DNA immunization of rabbits have been shown to be effective reagents for the in vitro detection of rabies virus and quantification of rabies glycoprotein antigens.