Recent studies have demonstrated that intravenous transplantation or local injection of bone marrow cells can induce unexpected changes of their fate. The results of these experiments showed that after transplantation or injecton, some of tissue specific somatic cells such as hepatocytes, skeleton, cardiac muscle cells and brain cells expressed the donor cell-specific genes, such as Y chromosome. There are two hypotheses that can explain this phenomenon. One is bone marrow stem cell transdifferentiation and the other is spontaneous cell fusion.

This study investigated the protection against the ND in chickens by a recombinant DNA vaccine. A plasmid vector encoding NDV F protein, which is reqired for virus cell fusion and is important for vaccine induced immunity, was used as a model to study how DNA vaccines may be modulated by the simulaneous expression of chicken IL-2. The NDV D26 strain F gene with CMV promotor and BGH polyA signal sequence was amplified by PCR from eukaryotic plasmid pcDNA-F, which contains the full-length NDV F gene, and clond into reconstructed eukaryotic plasmid pcDNA-IL2, which contains chicken IL-2 gene. Restriction endonuclease cleavage and PCR amplification showed that a bicistronic plasmid encoding NDV F gene and chicken IL-2 separately was successfully constructed. Two-week-old SPF chickens were intramuscularly innoculated the recombinant plasmid. Antibody and lymphocyte proliferative assay showed that the humoral and cellular immunity of chickens vaccinated the recombinant plasmid greatly increased compared with those innoculated only plasmid expressing NDV F protein. Challenged with the lethal dose of NDV F48E9 strain, 72% chickens vaccinated recombinant plasmid were survived, and 30% chickens vaccinated plasmid expressing F protein were survived. These results proved the adjuvant effect of chicken IL-2, and further showed that the efficacy of a DNA vaccine can be greatly improved by simultaneous expression of IL-2.