ABSTRACT
A group of SARS-Iike coronaviruses(SL-CoV)have been identified in horseshoe bats.Despite SL-CoVs and SARS-CoV share identical genome structure and high-level sequence similarity,SL-CoV does not bind to the same cellular receptor as for SARS-CoV and the N-terminus of the S proteins only share 64% amino acid identity,suggesting there are fundamental differences between these two groups of coronaviruses.To gain insight into the basis of this difference,we established a recombinant adenovirus system expressing the S protein from SL-CoV(rAd-Rp3-S)to investigate its immune characterization.Our results showed that immunized mice generated strong humoral immune responses against the SL-CoV S protein.Moreover,a strong cellular immune response demonstrated by elevated IFN-γ and IL-6 levels was also observed in these mice.However,the induced antibody from these mice had weaker cross-reaction with the SARS-CoV S protein,and did not neutralize HIV pseudotyped with SARS-CoV S protein.These results demonstrated that the immunogenicity of the SL-CoV S protein is distinct from that of SARS-CoV,which may cause the immunological differences between human SARS-CoV and bat SL-CoV.Furthermore,the recombinant virus could serve as a potential vaccine candidate against bat SL-CoV infection.