of recombinant baculoviruses for expression of viral proteins example 3 addresses purification of capsomeres example 4 describes an immunization protocol for production of antisera and monoclonal antibodies example 5 provides a peptide elisa to quantitate capsomere formation example 6 describes an antigen capture elisa to quantitate capsomere formation example 7 provides a hemagglutinin assay to assay for the induction of neutralizing antibodies dna encoding the bpv 16 l1 open reading frame was excised from plasmid 16 114 k l1 l2 psynxtvi u2212 kirnbauer et al j virol 67 6929 6936 1994 using bglii and the resulting fragment subcloned into puc19 new england biolabs beverly mass previously linearized at the unique bamhi restriction site two basic expression constructs were first generated to permit subsequent insertion of dna to allow fusion protein expression one construct encoded hpv 16 l1 u03b4310 having a nine amino acid deletion the deleted region was known to show low level homology with all other papilloma virus l1 proteins the second construct hpv 16 l1 u03b4c encoded a protein having a 34 amino acid deletion of the carboxy terminal l1 residues other constructs include an ecorv restriction site at the position of the deletion for facilitated insertion of dna encoding other protein sequences addition of the ecorv site encodes two non l1 protein amino acids aspartate and isoleucine two primers seq id nos 5 and.