Microbial Containment Complex, National Institute of Virology, Sus Road, Pashan, Pune-411021, India.
Abstracts of the papers presented at the International Conference of Indian Virological Society on “Emerging and Re-emerging viral Diseases of the Tropics and Subtropics” at Indian Agricultural Research Institute, New Delhi, India, December 11–14, 2007.
India, most epidemics of encephalitis in children have previously been associated with Japanese encephalitis (JE). However, several outbreaks of encephalitis with high mortality remained undiagnosed, with the first reported as early as 1954 in Jamshedpur in central India,5 followed by those in Nagpur in 1958, in Raipur in 1965,6 and thereafter in the Warangal District of Andhra Pradesh in 1997 and 2002. These outbreaks were attributed to dengue, Chikungunya virus, measles, JE, and Reye's syndrome8 because they were clinically indistinguishable and no definitive laboratory diagnosis was made. Later, morphodiagnosis by electron microscopy and molecular tools helped in the detection of Chandipura virus. Molecular tools like RT PCR are commonly used for the detection of both JE and Chandipura virus apart from the classical IgM ELISA test. Therefore, there was a need to explore for putative biomarkers for the disease tagging of either Chandipura or Japanese encephalitis. This was done by the profiling of differential gene expression of different cell lines infected with both JE and Chandipura. The cell lines used were human and mouse neuroblastomma's and RD and BHK21 for Chandipura and Japanese encephalitis respectively. Differential expression of genes revealed the presence of 13 novel genes common to both of them and 8 unique to Chandipura and 12 unique to JE. All the genes reported are still uncharacterized. The micro array data was further validated by designing primers for each of these and performing RT PCRs,. However, 2–4 potential putative biomarkers for the tagging of encephalitis have been identified which is being tested on patient samples as well.
