An immortalized porcine mesangial cell line competent for the cultivation of Japanese encephalitis virus

Abstract Japanese encephalitis virus causes a huge threat to the pig-raising industry and attenuated-live vaccines are widely used to prevent JEV infection. Nowadays, primary hamster kidney cells and Vero cells are mostly used for the propagation of JEV attenuated vaccines. In this research, we constructed porcine-derived-immortalized mesangial cells (PMCs) for JEV cultivation, and their characteristics were also studied. The prepared PMCs were uniform in shape and without variation in chromosome numbers. Furthermore, PMCs showed strong division and proliferation ability, and JEV could replicate efficiently as well causing a cytopathic effect similar to that in Vero cells. The viral tiler results showed that JEV grows faster in PMCs compared with that in Vero cells. Taken together, we generated an immortalized PMC cell line competent for the cultivation of JEV, which has significance for the production of pig JEV attenuated vaccines.