The pre membrane and envelope protein is the crucial virulence determinant of Japanese encephalitis virus

After sequence comparison, it was found that there are multiple amino acid mutations in pre-M and envelope (E) protein of Japanese encephalitis virus vaccine strain comparison with wild type (WT) strain SA14. It is generally acknowledged it is the mutations that have caused the virulence attenuation of vaccine strain, but lack of sufficient experimental evidences. For a better understanding of the mechanism of attenuation of Japanese encephalitis virus (JEV), in this study, we assessed whether prM/E is critical neurovirulence determinants of JEV with infectious cDNA clones technique. Substitutions prM/E of vaccine strain with that of WT SA14 did significantly increase the virulence of JEV to the similar level of wild type SA14, and simultaneously, replacement prM/E of JEV WT strain SA14 with that of vaccine strain SA14-14-2 decreased the virulence of JEV significantly to the similar level of vaccine stain. The results indicate that the prM/E protein is the crucial virulence determinant of Japanese encephalitis virus, although other proteins take part in the process to some extent.