1. Introduction
EBOV is a negative-sense single RNA virus capable of causing acute hemorrhagic fever with a frightening fatality rate that can reach up to 90%(Cantoni and Rossman, 2018; Harrod, 2015). EBOV is responsible for several outbreaks in Central and West Africa (Awini et al., 2017; Baize et al., 2014; Subissi et al., 2018). Due to its high lethality and frequent recurrence, EBOV is a substantial threat to public health.
Neutralizing antibodies play a crucial role in the race and balance between pathogens and host protection, and thus, neutralizing antibodies are considered essential to assess immune function, immunogenicity evaluation of vaccines, and antiviral drug research. For some lethal viruses, including EBOV, research on live virus is restricted to BSL-4 laboratories; therefore, conventional serological detection methods cannot provide a safe way to evaluate neutralizing activity, resulting in a bottleneck of the antibody-based detection of such viruses.
Currently, pseudotyped viruses are widely used as a powerful tool in studying multiple aspects of the infection progress of various viruses. With advantage of safety, many groups have produced diverse pseudotyped viruses bearing glycoproteins (GPs) of different viruses to achieve their research goals (Cheresiz et al., 2014; Lennemann et al., 2017; Zhao et al., 2013). Here, based on the luciferase-expressing human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) backbone, we aim to develop and apply a neutralization assay for EBOV using the generated lentivirus-based pseudotyped EBOV bearing GP on the surface, which may reduce the risk and threat of this virus due to its single infection cycle.