RESUMO
Brucellosis is an infectious disease affecting humans and animals worldwide. Effective methods of control include inducing immunity in animals by vaccination and elimination. Brucella abortus S19 is one of the popular vaccines for control of cattle brucellosis, as it has low virulence. In this paper, allelic exchange plasmids of wzm and wzt genes were constructed and partially knocked out to evaluate the effects on the induction of immunity to Brucella abortus S19 mutants. Cytokine secretion in vitro, INF-γ induction in vivo and antibody dynamics were evaluated. These data suggested that the immunity-eliciting ability of the wzm and wzt gene deletion mutants was similar, although reduced compared with the S19 strain. The results demonstrated that the wzt gene may be more important in the regulation of the induction of immunity than the wzm gene.
