Detection of ongoing asymptomatic Porcine deltacoronavirus infections via transiently produced IgGs using protein-peptide hybrid microarray

作者：Mengyu Li, Li J, L Yang, Zhiwei Li, Dayong Gu, Xiaoting Xu, Ying Liu, X F Li, W Wang, Li B, Hongwei Ma · 发表于：Frontiers in Microbiology · 年份：2026 · DOI：10.3389/fmicb.2026.1846662 · 研究领域：Animal Virus Infections Studies、Virus-based gene therapy research、Viral Infections and Immunology Research

Background Asymptomatic hosts can shed pathogens without showing clinical symptoms, making them invisible to routine screenings and potent drivers of pathogen dissemination and epidemic outbreaks. The lack of reliable, cost-effective tools for large-scale identification of asymptomatic infections hampers early intervention and control strategies. Porcine deltacoronavirus (PDCoV), a zoonotic pathogen with potential for cross-species transmission, presents a critical case for improving such detection methodologies. Methods We improved the IgG serodynamics-based epitope discovery method by integrating clustering and high-level analysis, which helped us identify linear epitopes with immunogenicity from a large number of candidate epitopes. Epitopes were filtered using negative sera identified by virus neutralization tests (VNT) to eliminate highly antigenic probes. These remaining low antigenicity probes were used to construct a protein-peptide hybrid microarray (PPHM PDCoV ). The platform was applied to detect PDCoV-specific transiently produced IgGs (TPIs) in serum samples collected from pigs aged 28–174 days. Results The PPHM PDCoV successfully detected asymptomatic PDCoV infections in pigs, particularly showing a peak infection rate of 15% at 45 days of age. The platform enabled not only the detection of asymptomatic carriers but also the characterization of infection stages. Conclusion The study provides a novel, specific, and practical platform for detecting asymptomatic PD...