Purification of porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome virus using ultrafiltration and liquid chromatography

•Development of a rapid, simple, scalable process for PRRS virus purification, The overall process achieved a recovery of 50% of raw virus, with a purity close to that obtained by CsCl coupled with sucrose density gradients.•Higher ion strength would result in damage to the PRRSV surface protein GP5 during IEX, therefor it should be careful to select IEC for purfication of PRRS virus.

Porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome (PRRS) virus causes severe and persistent disease in pigs worldwide. Its heterogeneity poses a major challenge for the effective prevention and control of PRRS. Purified viruses are essential for serological studies. Traditional methods for purifying PRRS virus are time- and labor-intensive and difficult to scale-up and requires long processing time. Here, we describe a rapid, simple, scalable process for PRRS virus purification. Highly pure viral particles were obtained after ultrafiltration and liquid chromatography, as confirmed by SDS-PAGE and electron microscopy. The overall process achieved a recovery of 50% of raw virus, with a purity close to that obtained by CsCl coupled with sucrose density gradients. The purification process described here should be useful in large-scale production of highly pure PRRS virus.