Detection of Infectious Bursal Disease Virus in Various Lymphoid Tissues of Experimentally Infected Specific Pathogen Free Chickens by Different Reverse Transcription Polymerase Chain Reaction Assays

Abstract Infectious bursal disease (IBD) is a worldwide distributed immunosuppressive viral disease in young chickens, controlled by vaccination. Emergence of several strains of IBD virus (IBDV) has created a demand for strain-specific diagnostic tools. In the present experiment, five different reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) assays, including two recently developed strain-specific assays, were employed for detection of ribonucleic acid (RNA) from three different IBDV strains in bursa tissue samples from experimentally infected specific pathogen free chickens. The virus strains included vaccine strain D78, classical strain Faragher 52/70, and the very virulent Danish strain DK01. The presence of the virus infection was confirmed by histopathologic evaluation of bursa lesions. The largest number of positive samples was obtained with a strain-specific two-step multiplex (MPX) RT-PCR assay based on iScript enzyme, and the commercially available Qiagen one-step RT-PCR. Between these m...