Construction of high-throughput screening libraries for identifying important foot-and mouth disease virus antigenic sites

This study constructed three foot-and-mouth disease virus (FMDV) peptide phage display libraries to identify important epitopes. All three libraries are novel. Biopanning against FMDV serotype-specific IgGs from infected sera samples yielded no binders for SAT1 and SAT2 but three positive binders for SAT3. These SAT3 binders shared an identical nucleotide sequence, confirming one binder sequence for SAT3. Further analysis identified SAT3φ1 as a positive 36-mer peptide sequence in the C-terminus of VP1, overlapping the N-terminus of 2A. Illumina MiSeq sequencing identified nine potential antigenic sites/regions within FMDV SAT3 viral proteins, with five correlating with published research on other FMDV serotypes. This study proposes potential immunogenic regions for SAT3, suggesting new discoveries in FMDV antigenic sites.