Engineering of a live Salmonella enterica serovar Choleraesuis negative-marker strain that allows serological differentiation between immunised and infected animals

• Attenuated Salmonella Choleraesuis as DIVA vehicle in mice.
• OmpA is a good negative marker for DIVA attenuated strains of Salmonella Choleraesuis.
• ompA deletion does not affect the immunogenicity of the parental strains.

The usefulness of Salmonella vaccine vehicles is limited by the fact that control programmes relying on Salmonella bacteriology and serology cannot differentiate infected animals from vaccinated ones, an ability referred to as DIVA (differentiating infected from vaccinated animals). As a first step towards Salmonella-based DIVA vaccines, the ompA gene was deleted in live attenuated ΔphoP and ΔrpoS vaccine strains. The ompA gene is present in all Salmonella enterica serovars and it encodes an abundant, highly immunogenic outer membrane protein.The double mutant ΔphoP ΔompA and ΔrpoS ΔompA strains showed similar virulence attenuation, safety and immunogenicity in a mouse model of infection as the parental ΔphoP and ΔrpoS strains. Sera from mice inoculated with the double mutant strains failed to recognise OmpA in Western blots of outer membrane extracts, whereas the protein was recognised by sera from mice inoculated with wild-type Salmonella or a mixture of double mutant and parental strains. These data suggest that OmpA can be a suitable negative marker for DIVA vaccines.