Researchers have developed a New and Ultra-sensitive diagnostic test for Infectious Bronchitis Virus.

Image taken from: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0145305X99000725 

In a recent article published by BMC Veterinary Research, researchers including Lipping Yan of the Institute of Immunology and College of Veterinary Medicine, Nanjing Agricultural University in China have developed two specific, sensitive and rapid indirect microarray diagnostic tests for Infectious Bronchitis Virus.

Infectious bronchitis is a viral disease that causes significant damage to infected chickens across the globe. It is caused by the Infectious Bronchitis Virus (IBV) which is a single stranded, positive sense RNA virus. The pathogenic virus causes acute respiratory damages to chickens resulting in high mortality and huge economic losses. To reduce economic losses, chickens are usually vaccinated with an inactivated vaccine which enables them to produce less or no antibodies against the viral non-structural proteins hence preventing virus infection and replication.

Diagnosis of the Infectious Bronchitis Virus is largely done using ELISA. However, due to mutations and evolution of new serotypes undetectable by the conventional test, there is need for alternative rapid and sensitive diagnostic tests. Other diagnostic tests like Hemagglutination inhibition assay and the virus neutralization test have also been used but are also affected with the same limitation. To solve the problem, ELISAs based on purified recombinant protein offer a promising solution. Hence, Lipping Yan and fellow researchers developed a rapid and highly sensitive microarray detection test based on non-structural proteins (nps) especially nps5. The tests detect antibodies against nps5.

The two tests; a chemiluminescent immunoassay test (CIT) and a rapid diagnostic test (RDT) were tested against nps5 expressed in E. coli. The researchers found out that specificity and sensitivity of RDT and CIT were 91.67% and 98.88% respectively. The two tests were highly reproducible and done in about 15 minutes. There was no cross reaction with other avian respiratory viruses like New castle disease virus, Influenza virus and Mareks virus hence implying the specificity of the microarray nps5 tests. The article concludes that use of microarray chips for detection of antibodies against IBV non-structural proteins offers a faster, rapid, sensitive and specific diagnosis of IBV for both research and epidemiology.

Read full article: https://bmcvetres.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12917-018-1586-x

Reference: Yan L, Hu J, Lei J, Shi Z, Xiao Q, Bi Z, Yao L, Li Y, Chen Y, Fang A, Li H, Song S, Liao M and Zhou J. Novel protein chip for the detection of antibodies against infectious bronchitis virus. BMC Veterinary Research (2018) 14:284.

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