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.