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African swine fever (ASF) is a highly contagious haemorrhagic viral disease of domestic and wild boars. It was first reported in Kenya, Africa and then spread around the world, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa. More recently, it has spread through China, Mongolia and Vietnam, as well as within parts of the European Union. It is one of the diseases listed in the World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE) Terrestrial Animal Health Code and must be reported to the OIE. Clinical signs are different according to the virulence of the virus. Acute forms of ASF are characterised by high fever, depression, anorexia and loss of appetite, haemorrhages in the skin. The mortality rates of the virulent strain infection can be 100%, which is responsible for serious economic and production losses.

The pathogen of ASF is African swine fever virus (ASFV). It is a large, double stranded DNA virus, the only member of the Asfarviridae family, genus Asfivirus and the only DNA virus transmitted by arthropods, soft ticks of the Ornithodoros genus. The natural hosts of this virus include wild suids and arthropod vectors of the Ornithodoros genus. ASFV infections in its reservoir hosts are usually asymptomatic and develop into persistent infection while infections in domestic pigs and wild boars can lead to a lethal hemorrhagic fever.

ASFV is enveloped virus with icosahedral morphology and an average diameter of 200 nm. The genomes of different isolates vary in length between 170 and 190 Kbp and encode between 151 and 167 open reading frames. The ASFV particle is composed of several concentric domains: the internal core formed by the central genome contains the nucleoid, which is coated by a thick protein layer named core shell; an inner lipid envelope surrounding the core; and finally the capsid, which is the outermost layer of the intracellular virions. The extracellular virions possess an additional external envelope that is obtained when the virus buds out through the plasma membrane. However, the importance of this envelope is unclear as it is not required for infectivity.

Fig.1 Structure and protein composition of AFSV

Currently there is no approved vaccine for ASF. Inactivated vaccines were the first to be tried, it can produce antibody after immunizing animals, but can not provide immune protection. It may be related to the complex immune mechanism of ASFV or to the different ways of mature infectious virus particles. After that, subunit vaccine, nucleic acid vaccine, virus live vector vaccine, attenuated live vaccine and gene deletion vaccine were explored but none of them could provide effective protection. The large number of proteins encoded in the ASFV genome and the complex immune escape mechanism of ASFV hinder the development of ASF vaccine. It is necessary to further study the etiology, pathogenic mechanism and immune mechanism of ASFV for the development of effective vaccines.

Due to the lack of an effective vaccine against this virus, early diagnosis becomes very important for ASF control. Among the structural proteins that compose the virion of ASFV, p30 is one of the most immunogenic proteins and is produced during early stage of ASFV infection. These two characteristics make p30 a good target for diagnostic assays to detect ASFV infection. Creative Diagnostics is now offering p30 antigens and antibodies for ASFV detection. All of our antibodies are manufactured to the highest quality standards have been validated to work in various types of immunoassays.

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