As well as the discovery of heritable mutations related to the Lan-negative phenotype. Despite the high mortality associated with CCHF, the biology and pathogenesis of the disease remain poorly understood for several reasons: CCHF outbreaks are sporadic and have been generally restricted to a relatively small number of cases, limited animal model development, and the handling of the infectious virus requires the highest level of laboratory containment. Thus, early diagnosis and vaccine development are critical for both patient survival and for the prevention of potential nosocomial infection and transmission in China. CCHFV belongs to the Nairovirus genus within the family Bunyaviridae. The genome consists of three negativestranded RNAs, designated as small, medium and large in accordance with their relative nucleotide length, and which encode the viral nucleocapsid protein, the glycoprotein precursor and the putative RNA-dependent polymerase, respectively. Studies have indicated that NP is the predominant protein which is present in high levels early after infection, thereby inducing a high immune response that can be detected in infected cells. As a major protein primarily detected during the viral invasion phase, NP has been increasingly regarded as an important target of antivirus and clinical diagnosis. In previous studies, complete NP expressed in bacteria has been used to detect CCHFV immunoglobulin G and IgM antibodies; however, the instability of the protein has limited its application for routine use. Advances have made epitope mapping much easier today than it was before. Many approaches and technologies, including recombinant DNA, peptide synthesis, and peptide or protein display have highlighted the need for epitope mapping and raised the possibility of mapping to a sufficient level the epitopes of certain antigens of interest. Biosynthetic peptide technology is often used to express several 15–25mer peptide segments covering a certain target protein to determine the presence of an antigenic region or regions for a mAb or pAb by the use of Western blotting. Epitope mapping can be subsequently performed with a set of synthetic overlapping 8mer peptides for the positive segment detected by immunoblotting. The surface properties of the structural proteins, namely, hydrophilicity, flexibility, accessibility and antigenicity, were analyzed using the methods of Kyte and Doolittle, Karplus and Schulz, Emini and Jameson and Wolf, respectively. According to the results obtained using these methods, peptides with good hydrophilicity, high accessibility, high flexibility and strong antigenicity were selected as epitope candidates. In general, peptides located in a-spiral and b-sheet regions, which do not VE-822 msds readily form epitope regions, were excluded. Nucleocapsid research is an important branch of viral study, as virus nucleocapsids may stimulate human immune responses.