Evaluation of RABV Strains in Mice

Three RABVs were used in this study, including GD-SH-01, HEP-Flury, and rHEP-SH-P. GD-SH-01 is a wt RABV strain that was isolated from the brain tissue of rabid pig in our laboratory and is phylogenetically close to canine RABV (Luo et al., 2012 (link), 2013 (link)), HEP-Flury, a laboratory-attenuated high egg passage (HEP) RABV strain, which is preserved in our laboratory, and rHEP-SH-P, which is a chimeric strain whose P gene was adopted from GD-SH-01 and expressed in the backbone of HEP-Flury genome (Tian et al., 2017a (link)). Rabbit polyclonal anti-Claudin-5 antibody, rabbit monoclonal anti-Occludin antibody, and rabbit polyclonal anti-CD3 antibody were purchased from Abcam (Cambridge, MA, United States). Female Kunming (KM) mice (6–8 weeks old) were purchased from the Center for Laboratory Animal Science at the Southern Medical University (Guangzhou, China). Mice were housed in the Laboratory Animal Center of South China Agricultural University.