Cryo-EM to visualize the structural organization of viruses

The structure of inactivated mature tick-borne encephalitis virus at 3.0 Å resolution

Tick-borne encephalitis virus (TBEV) causes a severe disease, tick-borne encephalitis (TBE), that has a substantial epidemiological importance for Northern Eurasia. Between 10,000 and 15,000 TBE cases are registered annually despite the availability of effective formaldehyde-inactivated full-virion vaccines due to insufficient vaccination coverage, as well as sporadic cases of vaccine breakthrough. The development of improved vaccines would benefit from the atomic resolution structure of the antigen. Here we report the refined single-particle cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) structure of the inactivated mature TBEV vaccine strain Sofjin-Chumakov (Far-Eastern subtype) at a resolution of 3.0 Å. The increase of the resolution with respect to the previously published structures of TBEV strains Hypr and Kuutsalo-14 (European subtype) was reached due to improvement of the virus sample quality achieved by the optimized preparation methods. All the surface epitopes of TBEV were structurally conserved in the inactivated virions. ELISA studies with monoclonal antibodies supported the hypothesis of TBEV protein shell cross-linking upon inactivation with formaldehyde.