Edema disease led to high mortality among newly weaned piglets, so swine industry suffered greatly from it. Study finds that this disease is mainly caused by the exotoxin of Shiga-toxigenic Escherichia coli (STEC) after it colonizes the small intestine. STEC contains two significant virulence factors: fimbriae (F18ab) and Shiga toxin 2e (Stx2e). Although this disease is firstly described in 1938, there is still no available vaccine against piglet edema disease

Therefore, researchers in Institute of Subtropical Agriculture, Chinese Academy of Sciences (ISA) carried out a series of experiment, in their study, Stx2eB and FedF were each cloned to a pcDNA6.0 plasmid for the development of a novel DNA vaccine against piglet edema disease. In their animal trial in mouse model, the antibody titer, mortality, serum cytokine levels, serum malondialdehyde level and serum total superoxide dismutase activity were measured to validate the effectiveness of the DNA vaccine. They find that co-immunization with both Stx2eB and FedF is most effective for protecting mice from a subsequent challenge with E.coli O139 (Figure 1). Thus, a new vaccine containing Stx2eB and FedF may be effective for protecting piglets from edema disease. Researchers are validating this hypothesis in piglets.

This research was jointly supported by the MATS-Beef Cat-tle Yak system (CARS-38), the Chinese Academy of Science Knowledge Innovation Project (KZCX2-EW-QN411, KSCX2-YW-N-051), the Planned Science and Technology Project of Hunan Province 2012WK4021 and Program of State Key Laboratory of Microbial Resources, Institute of Microbiology, Chinese Academy of Sciences grant SKLMR-20110607. The main findings of this study have published on Vaccine, (http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.vaccine.2012.10.107 ).