Location: Endemic Poultry Viral Diseases Research
Project Number: 6040-32000-074-003-I
Project Type: Interagency Reimbursable Agreement
Start Date: Feb 15, 2016
End Date: Feb 14, 2021
Objective:
In this proposal, we hypothesize that poultry vaccinated against MD and with greater genetic resistance to MD are also less infectious, and we address the following objectives:
1. Determine to what extent poultry with genetic resistance to MD are also less infectious.
2. Determine to what extent vaccination against MD also reduces infectivity.
3. Identify phenotypic markers for host infectivity
Approach:
We propose to achieve these objectives with a series of experiments utilizing virus donor and contact recipient birds coming from genetically inbred chicken lines. Donor birds will be varied by MD genetic susceptibility or vaccination status. Infection rates in recipient birds will be measured at frequent time points. Duration of infectivity will be assessed in experiments where donor birds are transferred to a series of isolators with new recipient birds. Additional experiments will include donor birds from a series of inbred recombinant congenic strains (RCS), which are derived from our inbred MD resistant and susceptible lines and enable us to quickly map QTL for infectivity. Various algorithms for estimating host (genetic) resistance and infectivity will be adapted and refined for application to the experimental data.
