Standardization and validation of a novel reverse transcriptase polymerase chain reaction method for detecting virulent strains of the infectious bursal disease virus.

Background and Aim: Gumboro disease is an economically crucial veterinary condition in chickens. It is caused by the infectious bursal disease virus (IBDV). This virus consists of two serotype groups, of which serotype I strain is pathogenic to chickens. For many years, the development of molecular techniques for either diagnostic purposes or surveillance of the appearance of new pathogenic strains has mainly focused on targeting the VP2 genomic region. However, due to the constant necessity for the discrimination between already prevalent vaccine strains and new pathogenic strains of this virus, it becomes imperative to have an immediate molecular method targeting a consensus sequence to achieve this task using field samples to reduce costs. Consequently, we focused on developing a novel reverse transcriptase polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) procedure solely for this purpose. Materials and Methods: Eight Results: After determining the optimal RT-PCR conditions, the newly designed primers successfully amplified a 402-bp consensus sequence of the Conclusion: Our novel RT-PCR procedure has been demonstrated to be helpful in selectively amplifying the consensus sequence of the