[BIO24] Detection of infectious bursal disease virus using SYBR Green 1 based real- time polymerase chain reaction

Introduction Infectious bursal disease (IBD) is an acute contagious viral disease of young chickens known as Gumboro disease (Lasher and Shane, 1994). The etiological agent, IBD virus (IBDV), has a predilection for the cells of the bursa of Fabricius where the virus infects lymphocytes of the B-cell lineage (Burkhardt et al., 1987). Thus, IBD is a fatal immunosuppressive disease causing heavy losses to the poultry industry. The current method to detect and differentiate very virulent and vaccine strains of IBDV is by restriction fragment length polymorphism of (RFLP) VP2 gene. However, this method is time consuming, prone to error and less sensitive. The newly developed TaqMan real-time PCR is very sensitive but not suitable as routine test since the test is expensive (Jackwood, et al., 2003). Moreover, application of the assay in detecting very virulent and vaccine strains of IBDV has not been reported. Thus, SYBR Green 1 based real-time PCR assays were developed for the detection and differentiation of very virulent and vaccine strains of IBDV.