Research/New diagnostics
From Poultry Hub
Title: New diagnostics
Project Leader: Steve Walkden-Brown at UNE and Tannock at RMIT funded by Poultry CRC (Project 03-17)
Duration of Project: Now completed (1 January 2004 to 31 March 2007)
Contents |
Project overview
Molecular technologies, such as quantitative PCR, have the potential to reduce the costs associated with disease diagnosis and also enhance our ability to obtain fundamental information about disease processes.
Project objectives
Using Marek’s disease (MD) as an example, this project aimed to use such methods to:
- improve our ability to isolate and grow MD virus (MDV) and to pathotype Australian strains of MDV;
- conduct an epidemiological study of MD; and
- generate information to model MD.
Project progress
This project has been completed and the Final Report is available from the Poultry CRC (ISBN: 1 921010 18 5).
In the final year of the project, major outcomes included finding significant differences in MD susceptibility in major strains of commercial chickens; development and validation of methods for titrating infectivity of MDV infectious material in chickens rather than cell culture; and analysis of a major field survey on MDV in Australian broiler farms.
